The USDA Food Environment Atlas, which marks its first anniversary this month, offers Americans new ways to explore the factors that shape their food choices, the quality of their diets, and their health. The Atlas was recently revamped to include 78 additional indicators (totaling 168) that help paint a more detailed picture of our nation’s food landscape. By selecting indicators—which cover everything from a community’s proximity to the closest grocery store to adult obesity rates to the number of farmers’ markets—users can create a customized Atlas visualization showing where their community stands on the county, state, and country levels.

USDA’s Economic Research Service developed the Atlas, working with Federal agencies and private universities to pool their data. Vince Breneman, Chief of the Research Support Branch and GIS Program Manager at USDA’s Economic Research Service, noted that the Atlas helps further USDA’s open government efforts by “providing a new level of access to the public,” offering unprecedented insight into the factors influencing American dietary and lifestyle habits.

Creating a National Dialogue

The Atlas originally launched in February 2010 as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to fight childhood obesity. With over 100,000 visits, it is one of USDA’s most popular online tools.

“The initial rollout was to characterize the food environment, while this rollout characterizes how that environment is changing,” Breneman explained. By making this food environment data public, the Atlas is helping to shape the conversation about the nation’s health.

“The Atlas helps to formulate important questions, such as the correlation between closest grocery store or fast food restaurants to obesity,” said Elise Golan, Associate Director of the Food Economics Division at USDA’s Economic Research Service. “We hope this web tool will contribute to a national conversation on food choices and diet quality, and on some of the social and economic conditions to consider when searching for solutions to diet-related public health issues.”