Next time you’re going to complain about lugging a few bags back from the grocery store on foot, you should really take a look at Nathan Yau’s most recent data visualization. The statistician behind Flowing Data has plotted the nation’s food deserts, which by definition is any place residents have limited access to grocery stores, and it’s pretty staggering how far some people have to travel just to pick up common goods.
A couple months back Yau looked at the location of major grocery stores across the country—which parts of the nation shopped at HyVee, which shopped at Publix and so on. If you mentally overlap the maps, you start to see gaping holes where there’s seemingly no place to buy food at all. “That eventually got me wondering about the reverse,” Yau says. “Where there aren’t many nearby grocery stores.
