Health-Related Social Needs
Food Insecurity by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Food insecurity is captured in BRFSS as adults reporting they were worried about or actually ran out of food in the past 12 months. PLACES models county-level estimates and age-adjusts. The county pattern tracks income, SNAP enrollment, and grocery access. USDA also publishes its own food-insecurity rate via the Food Environment Atlas using a different methodology; the two estimates correlate strongly but do not exactly match.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Methodology: BRFSS survey responses pooled across years, fitted with a small-area statistical model, age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. Confidence intervals (95%) are shown for each county — wider intervals indicate more uncertainty in the modeled estimate, typically driven by smaller populations.
Lowest Food Insecurity Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported food insecurity prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Food Insecurity.
Highest Food Insecurity Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported food insecurity prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Food Insecurity.
What this ranking suggests
Food insecurity is one of the cleanest upstream measures in the dataset. Counties at the top of this ranking tend to also score high on diabetes, obesity, and child-development concerns measured outside PLACES. Read alongside the SNAP-enrollment ranking — high SNAP and high food insecurity often coexist, and that combination signals binding constraint rather than over-enrollment.
Methodology notes & limitations
Estimates are statistical model outputs, not direct measurements. Small counties have wider confidence intervals; treat narrow rank differences in those rows as within-noise. Counties where the underlying population is too small to support modeling are suppressed entirely (about 1% of US counties). All measures are age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. The PLACES dataset uses BRFSS self-reported data — self-report introduces known direction-of-bias in some measures (BMI is under-reported; binge drinking is under-reported), but the bias is roughly uniform across counties so ranking comparability is preserved. See the methodology page for full data-pipeline documentation.
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Measure ID: FOODINSECU.