America’s worst food deserts: Map-lovers edition

Pablo PecoraKhongoryn Els-Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Both a literal and food desert.

Food deserts are officially defined as low-income neighborhoods far away (a mile or more) from grocery stores. But distance, as the crow flies, isn’t that relevant, since only a few mutants and drone pilots navigate their cities that way. What actually matters is the time it takes to walk to the grocery store. The website Walk Score has the data to account for the hills and railroads and warehouses that separate you from food, and it has used that information to rank U.S. cities by food access.

Compare the difference between New York, where 72 percent of people live just five minutes away from a grocery store …

Click for the interactive map.

To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How

… and Tuscon, where only 6 percent of the population has such easy access:

Click for the interactive map.

Seattle is somewhere in between:

Click for interactive map.

To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How

City planners already use the Walk Score data to find their food deserts. (For more on why food deserts exist, and how people are addressing the problem, check this out.) You can play with the interactive maps for the top- and bottom-ranked cities here. If your city isn’t there, you can always zoom right in on your house (and prove that you live in a pizza desert) at Walk Score’s main site.

Here’s the complete ranking of big U.S. cities by percentage of residents within a five-minute walk to food access:

1. New York 72 percent
2. San Francisco 59 percent
3. Philadelphia 57 percent
4. Miami 49 percent
5. Oakland 49 percent
6. Boston 45 percent
7. Washington, D.C. 41 percent
8. Chicago 41 percent
9. Baltimore 41 percent
10. Long Beach 41 percent
11. Los Angeles 36 percent
12. Seattle 31 percent
13. Portland 29 percent
14. Milwaukee 29 percent
15. Minneapolis 29 percent
16. Cleveland 25 percent
17. San Diego 21 percent
18. Detroit 19 percent
19. San Jose 17 percent
20. Denver 17 percent
21. Fresno 17 percent
22. Houston 15 percent
23. Sacramento 15 percent
24. Atlanta 15 percent
25. Columbus 14 percent
26. Dallas 13 percent
27. Bakersfield 13 percent
28. Memphis 11 percent
29. Austin 10 percent
30. Las Vegas 10 percent
31. Phoenix 9 percent
32. San Antonio 9 percent
33. Nashville-Davidson 9 percent
34. Louisville-Jefferson 9 percent
35. Jacksonville 8 percent
36. Fort Worth 8 percent
37. El Paso 8 percent
38. Arlington 8 percent
39. Virginia Beach 7 percent
40. Omaha 7 percent
41. Tulsa 7 percent
42. Albuquerque 7 percent
43. Charlotte 6 percent
44. Tucson 6 percent
45. Kansas City 6 percent
46. Mesa 6 percent
47. Colorado Springs 6 percent
48. Raleigh 6 percent
49. Oklahoma City 5 percent
50. Indianapolis 5 percent
51. Wichita 5 percent