Food Environment Atlas - Data Access and Documentation Downloads

Food environment factors—such as store and restaurant proximity,
availability of local foods, food and nutrition assistance programs, and
community characteristics—interact to influence food choices and diet
quality.
The objectives of the Food Environment Atlas are:
to provide a spatial overview of a community's ability to access healthy food and its success in doing so, andto assemble statistics on food environment indicators to stimulate
research on the determinants of food choices and diet quality.
The Atlas can be used to:
Create maps showing the variation in a single indicator across the
United States; for example, number of farmers' markets or access to
grocery stores across U.S. counties and county-equivalents;View all of the county-level indicators for a selected county or county equivalent;Zoom in to specific areas and export or print maps;Download the full dataset or selected data in Excel and machine-readable formats.The current version of the Food Environment Atlas has more than 300
variables, including new indicators on all other general merchandise
stores (including dollar stores) and deep poverty rates. All of the data
included in the Atlas are aggregated into an Excel spreadsheet as well
as a machine-readable CSV format for easy download. These data come from
a variety of sources and cover varying years and geographic levels.
Previous versions of the Food Environment Atlas are archived and
available for download. The documentation for each version of the data
provides complete information on definitions and data sources.
In the downloadable Excel/CSV spreadsheets:
State and county Federal information processing standards (FIPS)
codes are provided. FIPS and GEOID are used interchangeably in the
online mapping tool and data download and they represent the same value.The variable lookup file links the short field descriptions
(indicator names) used in the data file with the longer indicator names
used in the Atlas."No data" fields are referenced with N/A or with -9999. Counties
that didn’t exist in a particular year are referenced with -8888.
The current version of the Food Environment Atlas data, along with
seven previous versions of the data and documentation, are available.<br>