Integrate data for hot meal locations

[lippytak]

Some CA counties (and other states?) have optional hot meal programs that allows certain clients to spend CalFresh benefits on hot meals from certain restaurants. Here's the data for SF: http://www.sfhsa.org/156.htm.

I got this explicit request today from an advocate at Bay Area Legal Aid who said her clients were always trying to figure out where they could get meals.

[daguar]

DID SOMEONE SAY HOT SNAKES???

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Jake Solomon [email protected]
wrote:

Some CA counties (and other states?) have optional hot meal programs that
allows certain clients to spend CalFresh benefits on hot meals from certain
restaurants. Here's the data for SF: http://www.sfhsa.org/156.htm.

I got this explicit request today from an advocate at Bay Area Legal Aid
http://baylegal.org/ who said her clients were always trying to figure
out where they could get meals.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/fureigh/ebt-near-me/issues/34.

Dave Guarino
Consultant, Health Vertical
(2013 Fellowship alumnus)
Code for America http://www.codeforamerica.org/
[email protected]
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/daveguarino/ | GitHub
https://github.com/daguar/

[alanjosephwilliams]

Worth noting that I have included hot meals in the current mockups. Let's
do it!

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 5:29 PM, Dave Guarino [email protected]
wrote:

DID SOMEONE SAY HOT SNAKES???

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Jake Solomon [email protected]
wrote:

Some CA counties (and other states?) have optional hot meal programs
that
allows certain clients to spend CalFresh benefits on hot meals from
certain
restaurants. Here's the data for SF: http://www.sfhsa.org/156.htm.

I got this explicit request today from an advocate at Bay Area Legal Aid
http://baylegal.org/ who said her clients were always trying to
figure
out where they could get meals.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/fureigh/ebt-near-me/issues/34.

Dave Guarino
Consultant, Health Vertical
(2013 Fellowship alumnus)
Code for America http://www.codeforamerica.org/
[email protected]
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/daveguarino/ | GitHub
https://github.com/daguar/

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/fureigh/ebt-near-me/issues/34#issuecomment-55980887.

t: @alanjosephwilli
p: 817 713 6264

[fureigh]

Exciting to hear this explicit request!

It'll take a bit of doing. The USDA data, which is more comprehensive and regularly updated — and which this is currently using, therefore — doesn't include information about hot meals. The State of California website data, which isn't updated as often and contains fewer records than the USDA data for California, does.

Options include:

1. Make a separate view that shows restaurant locations, based on separate data from the three [?] states that have this program. (That's according to this outdated page.)
2. ETL for America!

[daguar]

Notes for one proposed approach:

• Only 7 counties in CA participate in this program (per here)

• One can acquire the list for each of the 7 counties by going here https://www.ebt.ca.gov/caebtclient/cashlocationSearch.recip , selecting the county name from the dropdown, and then clicking "show all"

• So I'd suggest just doing that process, saving each of the pages as a hard HTML file (because it's only 7 and the form is Javascript-jank-ridden, making scraping hard), and then writing a quick scraper that processes those downloaded HTML files by reading the tables, spitting out a data source.

Whatcha think?

[fureigh]

I've already written that scraper! :) Set it aside when I found the USDA database, but yes, that's how we'll have to get the State of California website data if that's what we're using.

It actually submits the form for each county and scrapes the results. Would just need to be updated to select the 'Restaurant Meals' radio button.

[daguar]

Eff yeah! 👍

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Fureigh [email protected] wrote:

I've already written that scraper! :) Set it aside when I found the USDA
database, but yes, that's how we'll have to get the State of California
website data if that's what we're using.

It actually submits the form for each county and scrapes the results.
Would just need to be updated to select the 'Restaurant Meals' radio button.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/fureigh/ebt-near-me/issues/34#issuecomment-57554616.

Dave Guarino
Consultant, Health Vertical
(2013 Fellowship alumnus)
Code for America http://www.codeforamerica.org/
[email protected]
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/daveguarino/ | GitHub
https://github.com/daguar/

[fureigh]

Sounds like there are locations that the above won't capture: https://twitter.com/endeverstar/status/517815974209134592

Ideally, the USDA would have a dataset of hot meal locations the same way it has one of SNAP retailers. If that's not the case, we'll have to figure out how to handle additions. One approach would be to maintain a list of user-submitted additions and append it to the above data. That raises sustainability questions, though. I wonder whether the USDA would host such a dataset if we gave it to them (after scraping the sites mentioned)?

[lippytak]

Hot meal programs depend on state waiver + county administration (I think), so I doubt USDA has this data at all. This could be a really awesome opportunity to engage brigades in adding their own state data, whether that's by writing a scraper + PR or just digging through PDFs. If we do a couple states ourselves we'll be in a good position to abstract out this piece and share with brigades (like @daguar did for Balance).

[fureigh]

@lippytak I like the idea... there are only three states, though, right?

The most recent info I've found is from 2011 (see above for another source on that) and says the only states that have this program are California, Arizona and Michigan. If that's the case, by the time we do a couple of states we'll be done.