I’m worried this will keep me distracted for hours or even days. But then, it will also be highly useful to me on nearly a daily basis from now on. The USDA has created a “Food Environment Atlas,” which is basically a Google Map that users can manipulate to find out all kinds of things about America’s food system at both macro and micro levels, based on government data that can be mixed and matched with a click or two.

Just for example, you can see a coast-to-coast map depicting where grocery stores are dense and where they are scarce (note: that map might surprise you a bit), or fast-food concentration (above). Or you can see areas where a lot of poor people live and where the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away (food deserts). Or you can click down to the county level and get all the data for that county. There are dozens of data points in addition to those noted above, such as food prices, the number of restaurants, income data, and information on school lunch programs. 

The USDA explains the atlas here. 

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If you prefer your coverage of the food industry with a healthy dash of progressive politics (and let’s face it, many of you do), check out the newly redesigned AlterNet. The lefty, reader-supported news site has a new section on food.

The site has long covered food issues, but now there are more of them, and they’re all collected in one place. Many of them are excellent, such as Habiba Alcindor’s examination how poor people are increasingly buying their often-unhealthy food from dollar stores—”the rock-bottom of the food chain, the last stop before the food pantry.” See also Jill Richardson’s article on the shrimp industry’s ”dirty secret“: It’s “a health and environmental nightmare.” And Martha Rosenberg’s “The Overuse of Antibiotics in Livestock Feed Is Killing Us.” Perhaps best of all, Anneli Rufus, in her look at the health effects of sugar, gets high-fructose corn syrup right—what’s wrong with it, and what isn’t—something I’ve long been screaming for.

The food section features lots of articles from other sites, including the enviro-site Treehugger and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics. My favorite thing about it, though, is how well-designed it is, a relative rarity in a world filled with ugly, messy, unnavigable Web sites.

I’ve heard from several people who eat kosher for reasons having nothing to do with religion but rather with quality, health, and safety. But I had no idea until I read Slate‘s item on the subject that nonreligious motivations are essentially driving demand for kosher meat. Sales were up 64 percent between 2003 and 2008.

The Green Lantern’s Nina Shen Rastogi cites a recent survey finding that “I follow kosher religious rules” was just the sixth most-given reason for eating kosher. At the top was “food quality,” followed by “general healthfulness” and “food safety.”

But while it “makes sense that people would link the idea of spiritual purity with such notions as ecological virtue and public health,” Rastogi writes, “those connections are little more than leaps of faith.”

There are some marginal benefits to kosher inspections, but some drawbacks as well, as Rastogi outlines in detail. Essentially, there is little benefit for either human health or the environment to eating kosher. The same goes for halal meats, the Muslim counterpart to kosher. Still, if you want to keep kosher or follow halal rules, there are products available that are organic or otherwise eco-friendly, Rastogi notes. 

The BBC has an entire series focused on the most stomach-turning aspects of food, with a heavy focus on repulsive visuals. Necessarily for a show like this, industry practices are part of the nauseating package. The latest in the series, Britain’s Really Disgusting Food: Fish, has drawn howls of protest from fishers and seafood processors who say the BBC is airing “cheap sensationalism” at their expense. The hourlong fish episode, which aired last week, is the third in the “disgusting food” series.

The seafood industry accuses the series of making “willful factual errors,” by, for example, saying that in 50 years, there will be no fish left in the ocean. Industry spokespeople told the Telegraph that series producers “ignored the facts” in order to present “the carefully worded hyperbole of campaigning NGOs.” The trouble might stem from the fact that the series seems meant to be at least as entertaining as it is informative. I’ve only watched a few minutes so far, but the fish show relies heavily on humor, arresting visuals, and general wackiness. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, unless the motive to draw young viewers who want to see repulsive stuff on TV eclipses the motive to provide a fair and complete assessment of the industry.

The BBC pretty much admits to the shallowness of the show, responding to the criticism by saying producers “gave a broad picture” of the ethical issues surrounding the global seafood industry and that the show “was not an in-depth examination of the British fishing industry.” At the same time, the BBC said it presented a “range of views” on the subject, including from “a spokesman from the UK fishing industry.”

On the BBC’s Web site, the series is housed on a page labeled “Mischief – Topical Films With Balls On.” The page promises shows filled with “ambitious and unpredictable stunts.” The series host, Alex Riley, is identified as an “anarchist.”  

It turns out that the whole series is available on YouTube, unless it gets yanked. You can judge for yourself by starting with the first 10-minute installment.