Gredia Case Study: The Scope of US Food Toxicity

Before engineering the Gredia filtering engine, I needed to quantify the actual scale of the problem in the US food supply. I extracted and mapped the ingredient data for 447,000 USDA food products to visualize exactly how many products are contaminated with the 17 most common toxic ingredients and additives.

Visualization 1 (Red/Green): The Total Landscape (Nomic Atlas) This map clusters all 447,000 products based on their ingredient profiles. The color coding exposes the severity of the toxicity score (the number of the 17 harmful ingredients present). It visually confirmed the thesis: the majority of the US food supply is heavily processed and tightly clustered around toxic additives. Link: https://atlas.nomic.ai/data/niazzetta719/gredia-the-grocery-store-map-full-scale/map/cdb38e19-e9e9-466a-b1fc-8ac5425e4238#gVVn

Visualization 2 (Yellow/Blue): The Gravity of Toxicity (Cosmograph) I isolated the 120,000 products that contained at least one of the targeted toxic ingredients. This force-directed map applies gravity to pull each food product toward its parent toxins. The color gradient highlights the density of contamination, specifically exposing the dense red cluster in the dead center—highly processed products containing 6 or more toxic additives simultaneously. Link:https://run.cosmograph.app/public/33a71bb2-5250-4c6d-8277-d3652f4012f7