Mapping Free Food

Overview

MIT, like many colleges and universities, hosts conferences, events, and lectures during meal times, with catered food provided to attendees. This food becomes available for free to anyone upon the conclusion of these events on a first-come, first-served basis. Students or faculty who identify this food can advertise it on a "free food" email listserv. Typically, upon receiving notice of the free food, a student will have less than 10 minutes to reach it before it is consumed by others. This study sought to answer the research question: Where can a hungry graduate student best place themselves on campus, such that they are more likely to encounter free food (a scarce resource for which there is intense competition)? In the process, what can we learn about the general food landscape of options for students at MIT? More broadly, what can this tell us about food availability and areas of need in the Cambridge areas? This GIS workshop project explored such questions by spatially and temporally mapping the various types of food available on and around MIT's campus.

Data

Data for the project was sourced from two databases: A common campus listserv with approximately 3,000 subscriptions. Email messages from this listserv typically included the type of food, date and time, building and room number. The sample of messages from this study totaled 1,015 messages between 2015 and 2017. Any student subscribed to the listserv can post to it, and there were an average of 2-3 messages per day throughout this period. The "Victualler License Database" from the City of Cambridge, MA (as of Dec 2017) which contains records of eating establishment business permits. This totaled 481 businesses (372 off-campus, 17 on-campus, 9 grocery stores, and 2 food trucks).

Methodology

I combined the data on city restaurant licenses, on-campus dining hours, and the free food listserv. Using Python, I curated and categorized this data to find the average hourly food availability over a 24-hour period.  I then joined it to MIT campus building data, and performed a kernel density analysis to show the relative number of free food occurrences per building. Data was visualized in ArcGIS and Tableau.

Key Findings

This study found that the overall distribution of free food on MIT's campus was heavily skewed toward the fall semester, and postings tended to peak around mid-week. It highlighted the lack of affordable food options on campus, particularly after 5PM. This poses a problem for students, whose unpredictable schedules often require them to be on campus during "non-business" hours.

Recognition

This project was selected as an exhibition for the American Planning Association's 2018 conference in New Orleans, LA and for the MIT College of Computing 2019 showcase.

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