Inspiration
We learned about the idea of a food dessert in our philosophy class and were compelled to explore it further. A food dessert is when a lower SES community has poor access to supermarkets, ei healthy foods, and does not have the mean to achieve a healthy diet. This leads to increased fast food stores in these areas and higher obesity rates.
What it does
We wanted to see how this concept manifests in Orange County by using data on food access, income status, and heart disease death rates across the county.
How we built it
We used four separate datasets to analyze this problem: USDA Food Access Research Atlas, CHHSA Death Rate by Zip Code, Melissa US Zip Code Data, and Census Tract Zip Code Dataset.
Challenges we ran into
Because we were ambitious with our project and combined so many datasets, we ran into many formatting issues. Originally, we were also going to include a dataset that shows the amount of fast food restaurants in a certain zip code, but that dataset was incomplete and unusable. We also had issues showing food access per zip code since the USDA file was divided by census tract instead of zip codes and it took a while to find a census tract to zip code datasheet to use to convert the data.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
First Datathon for everyone! First time working with data for some!
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