May 28th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

While the “locavore” ideal is certainly an appealing one — if you eat food produced near you, the thinking goes, you minimize the carbon impact of transporting it to you, support small farmers, and probably get better tasting food to boot — it can be a daunting project to find what’s available, and when, within your area.

Four mapmaking students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hope to change that, using their data-mining and geographical skills to produce the first of what they hope will be many 100 Mile Diet Maps.

The initial map, currently available as a “beta” version, tracks food available within a 100-mile radius of Madison. An image of the area pops up with pushpin-style graphics of varying colors representing community gardens, restaurants, farmers, and the like; clicking on icons alongside the map allows users to single out categories of food (produce or meat, for instance) and see which nearby vendors handle it.

The designers of the map, who call themselves the “Chick Mappers,” gathered much of their data from Madison-specific nonprofits, but they clearly have ambitions beyond Wisconsin. “We designed the map so that we could fairly easily modify it for other locations,” says team member Althea Archer. “We estimate that it would take a couple weeks up to several months, depending on whether the cities have existing data sets that we can start with.”

Archer tells Green Right Now that in only a week of the map’s being online, they’ve gotten enough word of mouth that “we’ve had more than 2,000 hits already from 22 different countries.” Though they aren’t finished with the Madison version — they intend to add direct links to vendors, for instance, and create more search functions — they’re already talking about ways of implementing it elsewhere and are “anticipating working on a consultancy basis with other cities that are interested across the nation.”

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