麻豆直播app

Mapping the city: Busting conventional wisdom on food deserts

image of map
This map of Toronto, created by Michael Widener, shows the parts of Toronto that see a lot of activity between 10pm and 2am (the dark green areas) but where few supermarkets are open (black dots).

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by University of Toronto students and faculty.

Read part one: how transit can fix access to jobs

Read part two: what Toronto's waterways can tell us

Read part three: smart transport data pave the way for a driverless future

In the fourth instalment, 麻豆直播app News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Michael Widener.


The relationship between where we live and what we eat is complicated, says Michael Widener

The assistant professor of geography and planning at University of Toronto wants to debunk conventional wisdom about what is commonly called a 鈥渇ood desert鈥 鈥 neighbourhoods where there is limited access to healthy food. People who live in these 鈥渄eserts鈥 are thought to adopt unhealthy eating habits and will go on to have health problems associated with their diet. 

鈥淭here are a number of problems that logic,鈥 says Widener. 鈥淧eople don鈥檛 just sit in their homes all day. They move around the city 鈥 they go to work, they visit their family, they pick up their kids. They do all sorts of things, so representing a food desert as this simple spatial concept really isn鈥檛 all that accurate.鈥

Widener is working on a project for Toronto Public Health, highlighting some of the other factors that create access barriers between people and healthy food. 

鈥淲hat does the food accessibility landscape look like for people who are maybe not conventional shoppers?鈥

That鈥檚 what Widener is exploring, particularly regarding people who work irregular hours.

鈥淭here isn鈥檛 good availability for shift workers,鈥 Widner says. 鈥淚n particular for people who have a lot of time pressure 鈥 people who are working late at night, working two jobs 鈥 the ability to shop healthfully is even more difficult.鈥 

Widener created a series of maps that look at access to healthy food at different times of the day. He found that very few healthy food retailers are open late at night, even in areas where there鈥檚 a lot of late-night activity (shown in dark green on the map).  

Data for the maps were taken from the Transportation Tomorrow Survey 鈥 conducted by 麻豆直播app鈥檚 . 

These maps are a work in progress. The next phase of the project is set to tell a more detailed story about food access in Toronto 鈥 incorporating demographic data, information about people鈥檚 transportation habits, costs and daily routines. 

It鈥檒l look at different factors like whether 鈥渓ower income folks have worse access during late night periods than higher income folks, people who are older, people who are working two jobs or have more kids,鈥 says Widener.

He says this information would have been much harder to gather in the past. 

鈥淲e鈥檙e getting more and more individual level data so we鈥檙e able to look at, in very high resolution, how people move around the city, whereas maybe 10 years ago we didn鈥檛 have that good of information.鈥 

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