Should Hospitals Become an Oasis in the Food Desert?
Toni Carey also regularly blogs about social media and health care issues for The Buzz Bin, a PR and marketing blog.This post originally appeared on the Buzz Bin blog on Sept. 16.
Food deserts (any census area where at least 20 percent of inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33 percent) continue to be a hot topic as the obesity epidemic remains a nationwide focus. Earlier this year, Rishabh Mehrotra, president and chief executive officer of SHPS, Inc., wrote a guest post for The Buzz Bin about food desert ratios and how to fill the gap. He noted that, “the average American family of four grocery budget of $700 per month is 3.5 times the monthly food budget of families in low-income neighborhoods” and food prices “are between 6 percent to 21 percent higher in lower income neighborhoods due to the inability to use standard trucking and processes.”
