The Food Environment Equity Dashboard for New York City (FEED-NYC) engaged a wide range of stakeholders, including members of advocacy groups, community organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions to identify important aspects of the food environment that, if visualized using public and novel sources of data in tandem, would help advocates, service providers, and policymakers further strengthen their efforts to reduce and prevent food insecurity and support New Yorkers in need. The stakeholders and research team identified critical questions about New York City?s food environment, potential data to answer those questions, and ways this information could be visualized most effectively. We then developed interactive data dashboards to visualize three aspects of food insecurity: (1) disparate participation in federal nutrition programs like school food and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); (2) variable access to emergency/charitable food in different communities; and (3) differences in food costs across neighborhoods throughout New York City.

We used several novel data sources in the project: anonymized GPS data gathered from mobile devices; publicly available grocery price information scraped from the internet; analysis of Google reviews of supermarkets; and data collected from a mobile app used by clients of a large network of emergency food pantries. When these data were combined with more conventional, publicly available data sources from various government agencies, we were able to uncover important insights about food insecurity and inequities in NYC. For example:

• Even though school food is free for all public school students in New York City regardless of household income, participation in the school breakfast and lunch programs varies significantly across the city and among schools within the same neighborhoods, even when controlling for school-level rates of student poverty.
• Despite the presence of emergency food pantries throughout New York City, data on food pantry use shows that many individuals travel outside of their home neighborhoods to get emergency food, even when there are one or more pantries in closer proximity to their homes. 
• Prices of identical food items varied significantly at stores across a large chain of independent supermarkets located throughout New York City. In some neighborhoods with high rates of food insecurity, both rent burdens and food prices were high. This illustrates the challenges people face when shopping on a limited budget, and the importance of focusing attention on neighborhood scale cost of living instead of commonly used metrics of food access, such as physical proximity to supermarkets.

By developing different methods of using data to illustrate inequities in the city's food environment, city officials and community organizations can broaden their understanding of the needs of their constituents and clients and consider new ways to improve the experience of New Yorkers facing or at risk of food insecurity. In addition, by making data more easily accessible and interpretable to a wider group of stakeholders, this process, and the prototype dashboard, demonstrated the potential for participatory approaches to data collection, visualization, and analysis to encourage greater engagement of the public in shaping food policy.  The project team has begun working with groups outside of New York City to improve understanding of food environment inequities in other communities.

Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/feed-nyc/home

Last Modified: 05/02/2023
Modified by: Nevin Cohen