Food insufficiency, or lack of access to sufficient healthy food resources, is a huge problem in Oregon and has been for decades. Since the USDA started keeping track of food insecurity in the mid 1990’s Oregon has consistently ranked as one of the “hungriest” states in the nation. In 2016 Oregon’s food insufficiency rate increased 18.4%, the highest increase in the United States. In the same period the US average food insufficiency rate actually dropped 6.8% (https://www.ocpp.org/2016/11/21/fs20161121-oregon-food-insecurity-spike-worst/).
The reasons for Oregon’s food insufficiency problems are not well understood. On paper, Oregon ranks highly in terms of job growth, low unemployment (4.5% in 2016), and high trade activity. Commodities in the state include cattle, nursery crops, hay, milk, and seed crops. The poverty rate in the state is less than the national average. The high amount of agriculture and healthy state economy make it particularly hard to grasp food insufficiency here (http://bluebook.state.or.us/facts/economy/income.htm).
This analysis is a preliminary step in an investigation of food insufficiency in Oregon.
Poverty is a known factor contributing to food insufficiency. The map below shows the 36 counties of Oregon colored according to the percentage of residents living below the federal poverty line. Mousing over counties gives the actual poverty rate and population of each county. Figures have been obtained or calculated from 2010 census data. It is interesting to note that many counties in Oregon have dramatically higher poverty rates than the 2010 US average of 15.3% (https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-01.pdf). The Oregon state poverty rate in 2010 was 15.8%, only slightly higher than the US national average (https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/isd/ra/docs/2011_oregon_poverty_report.pdf).
The data used to produce this visualization comes from the Food Access Research Atlas, referred to on the USDA website as “food insufficiency.” The data can be found at https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/80591/DataDownload2015.xlsx?v=42873.
Supporting data comes from https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/codes/files/st41_or_cou.txt (fips codes).’
This visualization was performed in R using packages readr, tidyverse, dplyr, maps, leaflet, and tigris.
R Core Team (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.
Thank you to Charlotte Wickham and my group members Andy Dang and Heather Kitada for their excellent assistance and feedback.