A food desert combines two conditions: low income and low physical
access to supermarkets, which the USDA formalizes as LILA tracts
The Food Access Research Atlas publishes several distance based
measures rather than one official definition, and the choice of measure
changes the map
The Atlas data supports policy analysis, site selection for new
grocery stores, and spatial analysis of transportation networks
The Beginner notebook visualizes the published 2019 Atlas for any
state; the Expert notebook reproduces the methodology from open data,
validates it against the Atlas, and extends it to other years
