You eat where you are.

I have spent the last few days playing with Tableau Public and will certainly continue. I downloaded the spreadsheet, mentioned in the last post, of the Food Environment Atlas data and used it as my source. The map is filtered to the tri-state area and the smallest level of detail is county. The graph is just what it looks like, states and their totals.

For this visualization I chose the data representing population that is classified as low income (from 2000 Census) who live greater than 1-mile from a grocery store (2006 data). Take a few minutes to explore the map and graph. You can manipulate the filters and mouse over dots for data. These were done fairly quickly to explore the Tableau Public interface and publishing features. You can certainly learn some things from this visualization, but it is just a different way of exploring one piece of the Food Environment Atlas' data.

To get a better understanding of the importance of place and food access specific to the Chattanooga area, read the Ochs Center's report on Food Access and Price from last December. These types of indicators contribute to getting an overall picture of a community's health and is apropos to today's Chattanooga Times Free Press which features a map on the front page for their Heavyweight States piece focusing on the tri state area's adult obesity percentages. Take a look at it and compare it with other indicators on the Atlas.

NOTE: The Tableau Public tool is only a few weeks old and might not work with some versions of Safari. I have tested it in Chrome, Firefox, and IE and it seems ok.

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