Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service released its latest annual report on the state of household food security in the U.S. The report documents the prevalence and severity of food insecurity throughout 2012 and contains data on household spending on food, participation in nutrition assistance programs, and strategies families used to cope with food insecurity.
Prevalence of Food Insecurity
Approximately 33.1 million adults and 15.9 million children lived in food insecure households in 2012. According to the USDA definition of food insecurity, this means a full 49 million Americans lived in households that struggled to access enough food due to a lack of resources last year. Forty-nine million. 49,000,000 people lived in food insecure households in 2012. I'm repeating these numbers to ensure the magnitude of this crisis is made plain. (And as Stacy Dean of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, "the data likely understate food insecurity because they don’t include homeless individuals or families.")
Disappointingly, but sadly not surprisingly given the ongoing high rates of poverty and un- and underemployment, "the prevalence of food insecurity has been essentially unchanged since 2008," the report explains. While the food security rate is unacceptably high, it’s important to note that the depth of hardship stemming from a prolonged recession and sluggish recovery was actually mitigated by the responsiveness of our social safety net – most notably the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/food stamps). As CBPP has documented in detail, SNAP closely follows the poverty rate, which means the program saw appropriate and needed growth over the past few years as the poverty rate grew.
While Americans of all ages, races, and family structures may face food insecurity, there are persistent gaps in the prevalence of food insecurity among certain demographic groups that have remained relatively consistent over time. Check out the chart below which shows the rate of food insecurity among white non-Hispanic, black non-Hispanic, and Hispanic households (who may be of any race) over the past three years.
Households of color in the U.S. consistently experience rates of food insecurity more than twice that of white households, a phenomenon that points to broader forms of racial inequality, including (but by no means limited to) ongoing disparities in unemployment and access to living wage job opportunities.