Fig. 1
©Emory University, reproduced under the CC BY-SA license
High-level view of the food environment. a Normalized distribution of average driving duration (left) and walking duration (right) of trips to restaurants and grocery stores from geographic centers of 1014 census tracts in the study region, using the Google mapping API sampled at random times of the day. To purchase groceries to prepare a meal at home, travel time by foot is almost always between 50 and 150 min. Since surveys indicate 20 min is the maximum travel time that most individuals will tolerate for this activity (17), this makes it an unlikely event. This is in contrast to traveling to eat out, which is always an option when driving, and could be a viable walking option at many tracts too. b Each business may be associated with several tags by Yelp users. The figure shows the distribution of the most frequent tags in the data. Left. Retailers including super-centers, supermarkets, grocery stores. Right. Restaurants and fast foods. Not among the top tags was ‘Organic_store’ that ranked 23rd among retailers and 187th among restaurants and fast food stores. Also, ‘Healthmarkets’ that ranked fifth among retailers ranked 243rd among restaurants and fast foods stores.