Project Introduction

For my mapping project, I decided to “map my refrigerator (and pantry).” As someone with a big interest in food, I was curious to see where the everyday items I was consuming actually came from, and if my pantry/fridge is really as “global” as I think living in a city like New York. I had big dreams of mapping the journey from farm to distribution center to delivery route to grocery store (to delivery) to home, but after meeting with a Digital Fellow, realized my dreams may be too ambitious for my current mapping skills. We decided it could be a good start to begin trying to map origin points of an item, and that QGIS would be a good software from which to explore the visual aspects of such a simple data set…but I soon realized it would be much harder to find the data than i imagined..

Note: Since the project was completed on my computer on QGIS, I don’t believe it’s possible to post a link. Please let me know if it is!

Capturing Data

I began with the concept of mapping my most recent Fresh Direct delivery. However, after looking at a few items and doing some google investigation, I realized that a majority of the items were a dead end. I decided to expand my reach into a random selection of items in my fridge/pantry from differing sources (FreshDirect, H Mart, bought locally, etc.) and see where it would take me. To get a large enough sample set, I went with 20 items, and another list of 10 items that had interesting dead ends:

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I decided to categorize items by country and item type to see if there were trends between the two. However, I would some come to realize that a majority of my items were from the NY-area (which didn’t do much in terms of the country discussion). Finding the actual coordinates of the place of production/growing was quite difficult. For many products, it was impossible to find the locations where the items were made, but very easy to find their corporate office (i.e. Fuji Apples or Ocean Mist Farms spinach).

Surprisingly, the items that were advertised as straight from the source actually had no listed source at all., e.g. FreshDirect noted their 2-year aged Parmesan came from a “small cheese-maker in the Apennine hills of Emilia-Romagna,” but it was not possible to find a name/location of origin. Other companies, like Bumble Bee for tuna, even went so far as to have an individual can tracker, again to no avail – the can was listed as “Made in Thailand,” but was the fish? Not sure. A not so surprising find was that Trader Joe’s was not as transparent as they say, with almost no information on their packaging as to where the products were coming from.

For the items I DID find an origin location for (defined here as where the item was likely grown/canned/produced), I collected the relative long/lats for the map. What’s important to note here is the serious risks taken in the delineation of “origin” – companies could be lying, Google Maps could be wrong (especially in the case with the Tahini site in occupied Palestine), more complex products (such as take-out) are really the result of dozens of products, and sometimes I had to take a guess that the factory I received the product from was the one closest to my delivery point. I tried to illustrate these complexities in the “Notes” categories listed above.

My final points for mapping were:

Mapping with QGIS

After a quick introductory lesson from a CUNY Digital Fellow (shouts out Rilquer!), I went into the mapping process. I spent a solid hour trying to figure out what was wrong with my coordinates when half of them showed up in Antarctica, and quickly realized I needed to clean up my longitudes/latitudes. Then, in combining them with a map of states/countries downloaded from an open source site, Natural Earth Data, they magically appeared! To make it more interesting for people to read, I decided to label them with the item name, and coordinate the colored points by category type – which as denoted earlier, didn’t do much in terms of analysis. I also played around with the “Heatmapping” feature to try and delineate areas trends in purchase locations. Again, given there wasn’t too much variety in my sample set (yes I am a lazy grocery store delivery person), it was not surprising that Fresh Direct was mostly local to NY.

What did strike me in seeing the items visualized was just how many of my products come from the New York area – and how one of my furthest sourced items was meat (yikes). I did some research to see if that was the case, or if that was a matter of FreshDirect actually being fairly “fresh” and “direct.” What I found was that NY is actually quite a hot spot for growing, particularly around vegetable and yogurt – which was evident in my map! That said, it’s also important to think about how grocery stores may reduce their products to local/closer regions in order to save money.

Where to go from here

I would love to do more with this concept for my final project. First off, I could have worked with a much larger data set in order to really pick apart some trends, but was restricted in terms of what was actually in my house and how easy their production locations were to find, alongside the general timeline/scope of this introductory project. Moving forward, I’d love to consider mapping certain aisles in a store (perhaps those labeled “ethnic), a whole section of my pantry, a certain recipe, a larger home’s refrigerator, etc. The possibilities are endless!

I also think an ultimate goal is trying to map the routes that these products are taking and start to get a sense for how “local” local products really are, or better visualize where my food is coming from. In doing so, I would need to learn a bit more about how to map routes, and whether QGIS is the right software for the task. And more questions – would I also want to visualize the date behind the route’s environmental impact, cost, etc.? The questions are endless!