Food Environment Atlas
Developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, the Web-based mapping tool offers comparisons of 90 indicators of the food environment among U.S. counties. Its three categories of food environment factors -- food choices, health and well-being and community characteristics -- encompass topics such as food prices, food and nutrition assistance programs, store and restaurant proximity, diabetes rates, physical activity levels, demographic composition and income and poverty.
Users can create maps that provide a spatial overview of a community’s capabilities and success in accessing healthy food. Maps can also be used to display the variation in a single indicator across the country, such as the childhood obesity rates of low-income preschoolers with concentrations of fast-food restaurants, sweet snacks and soft drink consumption.
The tool, which was released in February 2010, aims to expose how environmental factors interact to influence food choices and diet quality and thus can be used to identify causal relationships and effective policy interventions.
