Florida Meal Deficit Metric Update

Our firm developed new hunger totals statewide through a granular analysis of over 11,400 hyper-local areas across Florida. The work was sponsored by Feeding Florida at the behest of its extremely capable Executive Director, Robin Safley. This is our THIRD statewide update across Florida. The report below provides the comparison of three time periods: pre-pandemic, during the pandemic, and post pandemic.  Also check out special maps we developed with this new data for Leon County, home of Tallahassee, the state capital. The Map Compendium includes overlays of ZIP Code 32304, of great interest to local officials.

Are you a fan of data aggregated across ZIP Codes? We’re not.

Some studies predict missing meals across the U.S. at the county level but either they do not consider all households, or they do not net out everything. Local data is not used. And many organizations use ZIP Codes for data averaging on a wide range of other social factors. ZIP Codes are too large and can distort the true patterns of social conditions. Even if they provided accurate information, where in the ZIP Code do specific conditions of interest exist? This is not revealed and becomes a guessing game. Furthermore, ZIP Codes cross county boundaries. If a county department of public health, for example, were addressing health disparities with ZIP Code data where the ZIP crosses the county boundary, it is possible that the issue resides in the neighboring county.

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