An alarming study released today by Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks and 46000 emergency food service agencies, reveals that 1 in 7 Americans are now reliant on food aid programs such as food banks, soup kitchens, Meals-On-Wheels and other means of food assistance. This includes one quarter of all households with someone in the U.S. military.
Feeding America releases its "Hunger In America" report every four years.
The study, called Hunger in America 2014, comes nearly a year after the U.S. government reported that a record number of low-income Americans—more than 47 million—were receiving food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The study by Feeding America found that just 55 percent of those who get aid from its affiliated programs also received food stamps. One in five said they had never applied to the federal food stamp program because they believed they wouldn't be eligible for such help.
According to Maura Daly, the Chief Communication and Development Officer at Feeding America,
most of the people using their services are employed but are nonetheless routinely and constantly faced with choices between food and transportation, between food and medical care (the study shows that 65% of people have to choose between paying for food and paying for medicine and health care), and between food and housing.
The ranks of the hungry include 12 million children and 7 million seniors, plus millions more among the working poor, military families, the unemployed, and young college graduates. Those in each group said their reliance on food aid stemmed from a daily struggle to put healthy and nutritious food on the table when all that many can afford is processed and cheap junk food that fuels a cycle of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.
The origins of the extraordinary levels of American hunger have their roots in Republican (and unfortunately, Democratic) efforts to end assistance decried as "welfare" throughout the 80's and 90's. However the increase during the last four years has been unprecedented, aggravated by the Republican Congress' savaging of food stamp assistance in the wake of the financial crisis:
Maybe that should come as no surprise, given that food insecurity—defined by the Department of Agriculture as lack of ”access … to enough food for an active, healthy life”—has been rising steadily for years. In part that’s due to the Clinton and Reagan administration’s significant revisions to the welfare state. Yet the situation didn’t become a true crisis until after the 2008 financial collapse, which caused food insecurity to rise by 24% in the space of a single year, according to USDA figures. In response, the federal government approved an emergency transfusion of funds into the food stamp program; but then it began to roll back those additional funds in November 2013, even though food insecurity had never returned to pre-2008 levels. The result was an unprecedented state of permanent emergency for emergency food assistance programs across the country.
The crisis has also
permeated the ranks of college students, as the price for earning a living wage in the country now demands a college degree. As people with limited means desperately send their children to college, their children find that the price of admission doesn't always cover their need to eat.
As low-income populations have gone to college and food insecurity has risen up to swallow the lower rungs of the middle class, hunger has spread across America’s university campuses like never before. In some places, it’s practically a pandemic: At Western Oregon University, 59% of the student body is food insecure, according to researchers from Oregon State University (OSU). A 2011 survey [PDF] of the City University of New York (CUNY) found that 39.2% of the university system’s quarter of a million undergraduates had experienced food insecurity at some time in the past year.
The study breaks down food insecurity state-by-state, highlighting the problem in places where you'd least expect it, which is why when you "Google" the study this morning you will find a lot of
local reporting about it:
A new study reveals that almost 2 million people in Illinois use a food bank at least once a year. 230,000 of them use a food bank weekly.
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http://www.wbiw.com/...
More than 260,000 Hoosiers including 97,000 children in Central and Southeastern Indiana receive emergency food each year through Gleaners. That's according to their joint report released today
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http://woodtv.com/...
492,000 people in West Michigan and the Upper Peninsula turn to Feeding America food banks and meal service programs to put food on the table. That statistic includes around 58,000 seniors and at least 119,000 children.
The study shows that hunger does not discriminate by geography or race. Forty-three percent of Americans who face hunger are white, 26 percent are African American and 20 percent are Latino. In terms of location, they are literally all over the country, even in the "richest" communities:
http://blog.sfgate.com/...
While the Bay Area unemployment rate is at its lowest rate in years, a new national survey says one in five Alameda County residents gets food from the Alameda County Food Bank -- a rate higher than the national average and more than did the last time the survey was taken in 2010.
“So often, we wonder how a story this tragic could describe one of the world’s most affluent countries,” said Suzan Bateson, executive director, Alameda County Community Food Bank. “But billions in cuts to safety net programs, stagnant wages, economic recovery that hasn’t benefitted low-income workers, and skyrocketing costs of living have created this new reality. We may have seen it coming, but it’s no less shocking – especially when we now see what people are forced to do to get by.”
Not so shocking, really, when you have a Congress
dominated by a Party that long ago abandoned any pretense of actually representing the American people in favor of its corporate donors.
Congress passed a nearly $1 trillion farm bill that was designed to eliminate more than $8.6 billion from the federal food stamp program over the next decade. Republicans eager to spend less to feed the poor saw it as a win because it did just that.
The full study is
here.