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In Time for the Holidays: Interactive Map Shows Where Your Food Comes From

In Time for the Holidays: Interactive Map Shows Where Your Food Comes From


As people across the United States get ready to fill their bellies with green bean casserole and candied yams, a question may come up around Thanksgiving dinner tables: Where does all this food come from?

Now, a new interactive map developed by researchers at CU Boulder and The Plotline, a food climate initiative from the nonprofit organization Earth Genome, sets out to answer that question. It’s called Food Twin, a “digital twin” of the country’s sprawling and potentially fragile food system.

With Food Twin, users can look up their home county to see how much of 25 critical food crops their local regions both produce and consume. Those food staples include everything from wheat to tomatoes and peanuts, grown both in the U.S. and overseas. The map similarly tracks the flow of food across the country, following highways from sites like Kern County, California, to Denver, Chicago and beyond.

Food Twin also shows just how precarious that network might be, said Zia Mehrabi, a data scientist at CU Boulder who helped to spearhead the new tool. The map presents what he calls a “farm to fork” view of how increasingly severe droughts and heat waves may affect the nation’s food supply.

The United States depends on a little more than 5% of its counties to produce half of the crops consumers eat.

“It’s risky,” said Mehrabi, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies. “It really raises the question of whether the sources of food for many locations are as diverse as they should be.”

Food Twin draws on a heaping plateful of data—bringing together for the first time information ranging from satellite images of farmland to food availability surveys, census statistics, logistics computer models and more.

In Colorado, for example, Boulder County relies on locations like Adams County, Colorado, and Hockley County, Texas for its crops. New York, in contrast, depends on Putnam and Seneca counties in Ohio and imports via Renville County, North Dakota, and more.

Mehrabi, who has spent years studying crop production around the world, said that the map makes him see food in a different way.

“It’s one thing to have these conversations and hear anecdotes about how climate change is impacting food systems through cascading impacts down supply chains,” Mehrabi said. “It’s another thing to see that data right in front of you. It really hits home.”

 

Source: colorado.edu

Photo Credit - gettyimages-valentinrussanov

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