UrbanFood.org released

This new internet map site from Nathan McClintock shows both existing urban gardens and vacant or open spaces in Oakland, CA where food could potentially be produced. Publicly owned land with productive potential totals 1,201 acres while private vacant land totals 848 acres. Food production at these sites could potentially produce as much as 15 to 20 percent of Oakland’s fruit and vegetable needs. Read the report on the website for details. This is such a great resource, and beautifully designed.

National Map of Food Deserts

I live in a Low Access Area! According to a new food desert webGIS, my neighobrhood around 58th & Shattuck doesn't have access to a full-service grocery store, has low car ownership, and low median household income. I have never considered my self to live in a food dessert because I go to Berkeley Bowl at least once a week on my bike ride home from campus, but according to these combined metrics I am more underserved by full-service food stores than most other neighborhoods. I think this is a really neat tool to start a broader conversation about how to measure and evaluate food access and what it means for individual and community health.

As Grist writes...."The point of the project isn't just to map food deserts, it's to help TRF and other investors, as well as policymakers, calculate how much money is "leaking" from an area (being spent elsewhere), so as to evaluate whether a loan for a new supermarket is a good idea -- financially, presumably. As Stephanie covered in her piece, food-justice advocates disagree on whether small, independently owned but somewhat limited food stores are the answer, or chain stores such as a Safeway or Walmart.

Alas, the tool does not include data for health care expenditures or obesity rates in these areas, which would be interesting comparisons to see."

Hot of the Presses! Field Guide to California Agriculture

Anyone who travels California's byways sees the many faces of agriculture. A huge entwined business, farming and ranching are the state's dominant land use. Yet few Californians understand what animals and crops are raised or how agriculture reflects our relationship with nature. This fascinating and gorgeously illustrated field guide gathers essential information about agriculture and its environmental context, and answers the perennial question posed by California travelers: “What is that, and why is it growing here?” Paul F. Starrs's lively text explores the full range of the state's agriculture, deftly balancing agribusiness triumphalism with the pride of boutique producers, sketching meanwhile the darker shadows that can envelop California farming. Documented with diverse maps and Peter Goin's insightful photographs, this book captures the industry's energy and ingenuity and its wildly diverse iconography, from the mysteries of forbidden crops (like marijuana) to the majesties of scale in food production.

Check it.

Food Environmental Atlas for the US

Example from the USDA food atlas: pounds per capita of solid fats eatenFood insecurity, diet choice, access to healthy foods: these vary greatly across communities in the US.  In order to visualize these patterns and stimulate research and discussion, the USDA has published an online food atlas.  The USDA Food Atlas currently includes 90 indicators of the food environment such as: store/restaurant proximity, food prices, food and nutrition assistance programs, and community characteristics—interact to influence food choices and diet quality. It is fairly course, but very illustrative of spatial pattern of food insecurity, diet, access to restaurants and fast food, and many other factors.  With this interactive atlas, you can:

• Create maps showing the variation in a single indicator across the U.S.; for example, variation in the prevalence of obesity or access to grocery stores across U.S. counties. Check out this scary example above: pounds per capita of solid fats eaten (light green - low; dark blue high, up to 24 pounds);

• View all of the county-level indicators for a selected county;

• Use the advanced query tool to identify counties sharing the same degree of multiple indicators; for example, counties with both high poverty and high obesity rates;

• Download data.

Virgin Dirt: It IS all connected! Dirt the Movie. Check it.

"If we don't take care of the soil, which is just the first five centimeters layer of life that is on the earth, our future is totally condemned," said UC Berkeley Professor Miguel Altieri, Ph.D.

This video is an ABC promo about the Dirt the Movie presentation on Monday. Our buddy Ron Amundson is featured too.  Soil is disappearing, and fast. Check it.

The Michelle Obama Bounce: Organic farms

Retail sales of organic produce have reached $20 billion; 5% of veggies sold are now organic; and 1% of milk comes from organic dairy farms. And Michael Pollan (on last week's forum program) says there is a new form of organic conservative calling themselves "crunchycons".  It is a new world.  To illuminate these trends, NYTimes' map department turns to organic farms, and produces these useful maps.

Pollan is at it again

By "it" I mean brilliantly explaining the food situation. Read his Open Letter to the Next President from Sunday's NYTimes; and listen to him on Fresh Air (10-20-08 podcast).  He touches on everything we talked about in lab meeting last week - ethanol, cheap calories, obesity, GHG, growing biofuels on prime agricultural land, farmer's disincentives to grow food. This guy is amazing.

Measuring Your Food Environment

This site is related to the work Ellen and I are working on with Barbara Laraia and Irene Yen at UCSF. We are mapping the food environment for a study collaborating with Kaiser examining obesity and diabetes rates.  This is a new-ish field, with lots of new and exciting methods being developed to map access to "good" and "bad" food.  The National Cancer Institute has developed a site that collects many of these approaches.

Tracking marine resources through historical menus

NYTimes has an interesting article on the efforts of some marine biologists to track the relative abundance of seafood species through their presence and price on historical restaurant menus. Very cool historical ecology project.