The Food-Finding Map: How I First Discovered the USDA Thrifty Food Plan

When I signed up to make a map of food availability in Columbus, I didn't expect to be scouring grocery stores looking for elusive cans of bread crumbs.

Visiting six grocery stores in one day was an experience I hope I’ll never have to repeat.

Well, maybe I should clarify that we didn’t just pop inside the stores, buy a bag of apples or gallon of milk, and head to the next one. I wish. No, we marched in armed with a list of eighty-seven food items and went on a scavenger hunt to find the cheapest brand of each one and record the price.

Some things—like the milk and apples—were easy to find. But locating some of the other items hidden deep in the bowels of a huge Giant Eagle or Kroger was nearly impossible. These were well-stocked grocery stores, with seemingly every kind of food item imaginable. They had whole shelves of bottled orange juice. But just try finding frozen orange juice concentrate in a grocery store nowadays. Or canned bread crumbs. Where are those? It varies by store, but I can assure you that it’s never in the bread aisle. Canned mushrooms? Who buys those? And do they even make tomato paste in four-ounce cans anymore?

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting when I signed up for a cartography class at The Ohio State University in 2015. I thought we were going to learn how to make maps. We did that, of course. But the final project for the class’s service learning component involved making a map of food availability in Columbus. We partnered with an OSU social work professor, who gave us a list of food items and a list of grocery stores. Our job was to visit the stores, note how many of the food items they had and the price of each, and use the data to build a map.

I wish I had saved that piece of paper that our partner gave us, but unfortunately it’s not in any of my files. I’m pretty sure that she told us that the list of food items on it were the ones that the USDA was using as references for their Thrifty Food Plan in 2015 when we did the project. If so, that list didn’t seem to have been updated much since the 1960s. It annoyed me that the list included white bread, white sugar, and lettuce, but not the whole wheat flour, dry beans, and kale that I bought for myself. I was living on a pretty tight budget and my food expenditures were within the SNAP payments of the time, but there wasn’t much overlap between the Thrifty Food Plan reference foods and my own shopping list.

To be fair, the Thrifty Food Plan was massively overhauled in 2021, and it’s much better now than the version that was current in 2015. But for some reason, I wasn’t able to find a list of the specific reference food products anywhere online—only the aggregate cost of those products, which the USDA recalculates quarterly. All of the information only lists general food groups, not the specific things like “four-ounce can of tomato paste” that we had to find at the grocery stores. So now I’m curious: Are canned bread crumbs and frozen orange juice concentrate still on that list? Why isn’t that information published online? Why is the only reason I even know that such a list exists because I was handed a paper copy of it by a social work researcher back in 2015?

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I did end up making a map with the data. Our partner had wanted a map of food availability in Columbus, but the huge amount of data we had to collect combined with the tendency of college students to procrastinate meant that I never did get access to the full dataset in time for my final project. So I only mapped the nine stores we visited, and since they all had all of the foods on the list, I just color-coded them by price and added on bike and bus routes to show how people without a car could access those stores. If you ever need to ride your bike to buy canned bread crumbs in northeast Columbus, here’s the map for you!

I was so annoyed at the bread crumb thing that I only included the forty-eight real food items in the list when I made this map. The full list of eighty-seven items included canned bread crumbs, frozen orange juice concentrate, white sugar, white flour, white bread, and boxed cereal.