Giving Compass' Take:

• Eillie Anzilotti, writing for Fast Company, discusses how The Maryland Food System Map is the first of its kind to not only locate food deserts but shows the state's entire food system.

• How can these types of maps help inform state-wide food policy? 

• Read more about how we can eliminate food deserts. 

Mapping food deserts–areas where fresh, healthy food is hard to come by—is nothing new. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its Food Desert Locator, an interactive map of the entire country.

But food desert maps, in and of themselves, don’t point to a solution. The Maryland Food System Map (MFSM), launched in 2012 and comprehensively revamped in 2017, does. The MFSM plots out food deserts, but it also details the state’s entire food system. You can see the distance between a local farm and a food desert; you can see that a supermarket and a farmer’s market are clustered within a stone’s throw of each other, while the next neighborhood over lacks crucial food resources.

The MFSM is run through Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, whose mission “is to promote research and to develop and communicate information about the relationships between diet, food production, environment, and public health,” says Caitlin Fisher, program officer at CLF who oversees the MFSM.

From the perspective of the CLF, it’s not enough to just map out areas where access to healthy food is lacking; to really become actionable, that information needs to be surrounded by data that covers all aspects of the state’s food system to understand what gaps in access look like, how they come about, and how to close them.

Read the full article about understanding food deserts by Eillie Anzilotti at Fast Company