People from many areas of life may be affected by hunger and there are millions of individuals in the United States who are on the verge of becoming hungry due to a job loss, a missed payment, or a medical emergency.
Hunger, on the other hand, does not impact everyone equally; certain groups, such as children, the elderly, black, Indigenous, and other people of color, experience hunger at considerably greater rates.
Below are some very compelling statistics that will help you better understand just how serious of a problem hunger is for so many Americans and how COVID-19 has made things worse.
16 Facts About Hunger in America
Food insecurity is described as a lack of regular access to sufficient food for all members of a family to maintain an active, healthy lifestyle. This might be a short-term or long-term predicament for a family.
One way researchers estimate how many people can’t afford food is to look at food insecurity.
Using a range of coping techniques, such as eating less diversified meals, engaging in Federal food assistance programs, or acquiring food from neighborhood food pantries, low food security families were able to avoid significantly changing their eating habits or lowering their food consumption.
Normal eating habits of one or more very low food security family members were interrupted, and food intake was decreased at times during the year due to a lack of money or other resources for food in these food-insecure families.
Spending on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) as a whole fell by 6 percent.
Spending on child feeding programs as a whole fell by 9 percent. Investing in two new, short-term initiatives launched in response to the COVID-19 epidemic.
The USDA uses a series of questions on food availability from the Current Population Survey to assess food insecurity. In 2018, 7.4 percent of women with children under the age of 12 reported their children were food insecure, which is more than twice the percentage who said their children were not eating enough because they couldn’t buy enough food (3.1 percent).
If the current ratio between this one question and the entire measure of child food insecurity holds, 17.4 percent of children not eating enough would equate to more than a third of children being food insecure.
This result is somewhat higher than the total percentage of food insecurity among households with children 18 and under for that year.
How to Help Families in Need
If you want to help families facing food security problems, there are a few things you can do to help. Firstly, you can donate food directly to your local food bank. Another option is to donate money to a hunger-relief organization.