Food in LA - Health Inspection and Violation Visualizations

Project Description

Our project, under the Maker Track, is a data visualization program created using Python and Matplotlib. As a team of enthusiastic freshmen with less than 5 months of coding experience, we hope to achieve recognition in the Best Beginner Hack and Best Healthcare Hack overlays. Our program analyzes real-world data from LA County health inspections and health code violations to examine restaurant hygiene and food safety. This aligns with the "Tech for Good" theme, as food safety is a crucial aspect of public health that significantly impacts individual and community well-being. We’ve developed our project with ethical intentions by ensuring our data analysis addressed socioeconomic inequalities, offering insights to guide fair and effective food regulations toward more equitable public health outcomes.

Purpose

Our project addresses food quality and safety, illuminating disparities to offer a data-driven foundation for potential policy interventions. We envision expanding our analysis nationally and include additional factors such as race and health policies, enhancing our understanding of food safety in the U.S. This would empower policymakers to make informed decisions that support the most impacted and systemically disadvantaged communities, thus reducing major systemic gaps in public health.

How it Works

We used Python and Matplotlib to create visualizations for users to easily understand the food and health landscape of LA County. The color-coded map of geographic variations in health inspection scores, allows users to comprehend disparities in food safety at a glance. In addition, the graphs depicting health code violations and below-average median household incomes clearly illustrate the intersection of socioeconomic inequalities and health environments. These straightforward approaches not only make our findings accessible to a broad audience but also serve as a practical tool for policymakers and health officials to identify and prioritize areas in need of attention.