Food Access in the
United States



“The war against hunger is truly mankind’s war of liberation.” -John F. Kennedy
Is there equitable access to to sufficient and healthy food across the United States? How does food insecurity compare across the nation?

The goal of our visualizations is to highlight the correlations between national food insecurity and various factors, particularly geography and race and ethnicity.

We hope to help inform and educate the world about the disparities in food access in our country. Although our set of visualizations can be valuable for anyone, our specific target audience are people living in the United States. It is our responsibility to ensure that residents are informed of the food insecurity in their local communities and nationwide, how these problems are exacerbated by demographic characteristics, and what individuals can do to contribute to the reduction of this problem.

Prevalence of Food Deserts

Food insecurity is the state of not having access to enough affordable, nutritious food. It can have many adverse physical and mental effects, including malnutrition, birth defects, and chronic illness.

We measured food insecurity in relation to food deserts. An urban food desert is a place where residents have to drive more than 1 mile to the nearest grocery store, while a rural food desert is one where you have to drive more than 10 miles. Since rural food deserts have higher rates of food insecurity and our dataset is limited, we decided to exclusively focus on rural food deserts for our analysis.

Among the 3,141 counties in the United States, 2,074 of them have at least one food desert. This means that more than 66% of the counties in the nation have limited access to affordable and healthy food.

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How are different racial and ethnic groups relatively impacted by food insecurity?

We investigated if there is a correlation between food insecurity and race and ethnicity by calculating the percentage of each demographic group that lives in a food desert in each state and county. Although there is at least a 10% disparity between different racial and ethnic groups that are facing food insecurity in many states, some areas are significantly worse than others. For example, Hughes County, SD has one of the largest disparities with 100% of the Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander population in a rural food desert, compared to only 2% of the Asian population.

Next Steps

All of this data begs the question, how can we begin tackling this problem? How should areas or populations in the United States be prioritized in the fight against food insecurity?

We explored two common strategies: prioritizing the areas that are the most gravely impacted by food insecurity, and prioritizing the racial and ethnic demographics who are the most vulnerable to food insecurity.

We found that North Dakota and South Dakota have the highest levels of food insecurity in the country, even across different racial and ethnic groups.

How You Can Help

Anne Frank once said, “Hunger is not a problem. It is an obscenity. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

If you found this project interesting and want to learn more about food access and insecurity, here are some great resources to get started:
Thank you for doing your part to learn more and help!

Sources

We used a dataset from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 2015 Food Access Research Atlas. We used their most recent dataset, and wrangled and cleaned the data to remove erroneous data and exclusively focus on the columns we wanted to use for data analysis.

About Us

  • Hannah Cheung
    Hannah Cheung Hannah Cheung's LinkedIn
  • Louis Maliyam
    Louis Maliyam Louis Maliyam's LinkedIn
  • Mariam Mayanja
    Mariam Mayanja Mariam Mayanja's LinkedIn
  • Suchi Sridhar
    Suchi Sridhar Suchi Sridhar's LinkedIn
  • Rachel Ye
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This project was created for the course CSE 442: Data Visualization, at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering in the University of Washington.

Special thanks to our instructors Jeff Heer and Jane Hoffswell, and our teaching assistants Chanwut (Mick) Kittivorawong, Kevin Chang, Naveena Karusala, and Yang Liu.