Who doesn’t love arbitrary rankings? Cooking Light, in celebration of recycling the same healthy recipes for the past 20 years, recently aggregated a bunch of statistics to create a list of the healthiest cities in America. The District finished a respectable third overall, falling just behind the granola-totin’ cities of Seattle and Portland, OR. At least we’re the champs east of the Mississippi!

The criteria are dispersed among various categories and focus on the quality and availability of healthy food, who’s cooking it, and the overall health of each city’s residents. This list combines input from sources that make sense considering its objectives (CDC for weight and exercise, LocalHarvest.org for organic information) and some that are head-scratchers (Bureau of Labor Statistics for the number of chefs working in the city and how much they’re paid, number of Trader Joe’s/Whole Foods locations). According to Cooking Light:

Washington, D.C., earned the third spot on our top 20 list of Cooking Light cities because it ranked highly in the following categories: the number of James Beard nominees for best restaurant and chef per capita; the number of farmers’ markets per capita; the percentage of residents who consume five or more servings of fruits and vegetables per day; and its walkability.

In basing a good part of the criteria on quantity numbers alone, the list falls short where it could have gone more in depth. Yes, the food sold at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods may be organic/free range/massaged daily, but that doesn’t account for things like fat, calories, cholesterol, etc. Sure, there are a lot of chefs working in any given major city, but the butter they’re using to make their pan sauces isn’t going to make your ass any less huge. On the other hand, statistics concerning green space, parks, and walkability show that the survey attempted to incorporate data on health, as opposed to leaping to conclusions based on what seems like purely demographic data.

Photo by jennmich