Hungry all the time
Today is National Hunger Awareness Day
By Caroline Cummins
June 5, 2007
In case you hadn’t heard, today is National Hunger Awareness Day. You might think, given our widely reported problems with obesity, that today should be National Diet Awareness Day. But no. In the land of milk and honey, plenty of folks out there simply don’t get enough to eat.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, some 37 million Americans lived below the poverty line in 2005; meanwhile, according to the USDA, more than 35 million Americans in 2005 were “food insecure,” meaning “their access to enough food is limited by a lack of money and other resources.”
More than 12 million children lived in those food-insecure households. But kids aren’t the only face of hunger; 1.6 million of those households included senior citizens.
Groceries, or rent? Dinner, or prescription meds? We have plenty of food in America. But not everyone can afford to buy it.
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1. by anonymous on Jun 5, 2007 at 4:35 PM PDT
It’s unfortunately difficult to get accurate statistics about hunger in the US. The many definitions of “food secure” and “hunger” are often contradictory and misleading.
For example, the USDA’s “food insecure” label applies to any household where any member went hungry for even one day in the last year.
The actual number of people who are hungry on any given day is much lower than the above statistics imply -- <a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err11/err11.pdf”>between 0.5 and 0.8 percent</a>, or 1.5 to 2.5 million people.
But saying 37 million sounds better when you’re asking for a bigger budget...
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