- Humanitarian
Food insecurity is a major issue for many Americans. Food banks and food pantries strive to provide enough food to satisfy the needs of people suffering from food insecurity. These organizations are also trying to distribute healthy food, not just meeting the caloric intake necessary to sustain the community. The Mid-Ohio Food Collective (MOFC) is a food bank outside of Columbus, Ohio that was interested in measuring the healthiness of their inventory in a context that could be communicated to those outside of the hunger relief system. Specifically, they wanted to use a scoring system called the Healthy Eating Index (HEI), which is used by healthcare professionals. The healthcare industry wants to alleviate certain long term health issues, like diabetes, by teaming with food banks and other organizations to provide healthy food options as a preventative measure. HEI is a 0-100 measure of the nutritional quality of a set of food, with higher scores being healthier. Using a subset of the MOFC inventory, I used Microsoft Excel and Python to provide the food bank with an HEI score that they could communicate with healthcare providers to show they are distributing healthy food to their clients. The subset of the MOFC inventory had a score of 80.623 out of 100. While there is room for improvement, this was a promising start as MOFC can track scores and make changes to their purchasing decisions to raise scores over time. Though the process of producing the score is not fully automated, it is generalizable and can be performed for other entities in the hunger relief system, allowing them to demonstrate the healthfulness of the products they distribute as well.