The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling

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My team at the University of Illinois just developed the first high-resolution map of the U.S. food supply chain.
Our map is a comprehensive snapshot of all food flows between counties in the U.S.—grains, fruits and vegetables, animal feed, and processed food items.
1. Where your food comes from Now, residents in each county can see how they are connected to all other counties in the country via food transfers.
Overall, there are 9.5 million links between counties on our map.
Consumers all rely on distant producers, agricultural processing plants, food storage like grain silos and grocery stores, and food transportation systems.
2. Where the food hubs are At 22 million tons of food, Los Angeles County received more food than any other county in 2012, our study year.
It also shipped out the most of any county: almost 17 million tons.
In fact, many of the counties that shipped and received the most food were located in California.
We also looked for the core counties—the places that are most central to the overall structure of the food supply network.
A disruption to any of these counties may have ripple effects for the food supply chain of the entire country.
We did this by looking for counties with the largest number of connections to others, as well as those that score highly in a factor called “betweenness centrality,” a measurement of the places with the largest fraction of the shortest paths.
It’s possible that counties within the Cornbelt would show up as more critical in non-drought years.
3. How food travels from place to place We also looked at how much food is transported between one county and another.
Many of the largest food transport links were within California.
Some of the other largest links were inside the counties themselves

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