Mapping Food Origins

As the movie Food, Inc. illustrated, many big food companies are loath to allow outsiders—much less reporters or film crews—anywhere near their facilities.

A set of Google (GOOG) Maps links assembled by Parke Wilde on the U.S. Food Policy blog doesn't exactly give an insiders' view of processing plants or feedlots, but, as a whole, it does offer some fascinating insights on both the good and the bad of where our food comes from.

Those insights often come from stark differences. A map showing a large area covered by Midwestern industrial farms, viewed from high above, depicts a ravaged landscape set in a grid, all browns and grays. Another map showing an organic farm looks like, well, planet Earth: lush, green, with curvy rural roads and streams running through it. There are even trees.

Another map shows the border between Montana and Saskatchewan. To the north of the arbitrarily created borderline, grids of farmland dominate. To the south, it abruptly turns into a solid mass of deep brown, probably parkland. "What makes this view fascinating," Wilde writes, "is that this border was drawn along a line of latitude, not according to the landscape, so there is no fundamental natural difference in the land on the two sides of the border." Navigating across the map offers "a deep lesson in how policy influences the way land is used," says Wilde.

Some other maps show the encroachment of cul-de-sac suburbia on farmland in Eastern Pennsylvania; the world's largest industrial hog operation in South Carolina (owned by Smithfield Foods (SFD), one of the companies that refused to cooperate with the makers of Food, Inc.); and perhaps the ugliest image, a phosphate strip mine in Florida that produces 75 percent of the phosphate used in industrial fertilizer.