The problem of food insecurity in the United States was first widely discussed in the late 1960s. Since then, Americans have understood that domestic hunger was an issue, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the United States Census Bureau was able to come up with a set of questions to accurately evaluate hunger.
The difficulty was in establishing a meaningful definition of hunger that had a significance in an American context. Hunger in a country with so much food and a high rate of obesity seems like a paradox. However, according to a USDA food report, nearly 15 percent of United States households have severely limited access to food sometime during the year. These misconceptions and paradoxes emphasize that the state of hunger in the United States is much more complicated than a scarcity of food, and is rooted in systemic issues.
The United States position paper for the 1996 World Food Conference defines food security as “all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient food to meet their dietary needs for a productive and healthy life.” There are three dimensions to food security: availability of high-quality food, access to that food and adequate treatment of food-related healthcare. Surveys conducted on food concerns in the United States found that low household income was the strongest predictor of vulnerability to food insecurity. The Food Stamp Program, which aims to assist families in need, only provides 79 cents per person per meal on average. This isn’t nearly enough to acquire food of appropriate quality. Studies show that this shortage of food stamp money can lead to either sacrificing meals for the sake of family members’ nutrition, or a dependence on inexpensive staples.
Chips, soda and cookies are vastly cheaper than fresh produce because the federal government pours money into agriculture that is used to make these unhealthy food products. In the early 1930s and ’40s, as a result of President Roosevelts’ New Deal, mostly family farmers were benefiting from programs that subsidized food costs. However, as the agricultural sector became more concentrated, more of the operations benefiting from subsidies were more like agribusinesses than family farms. Since 1995, the USDA has spent more than $250 billion dollars on farm subsidies, often resulting in an abundance of food products made from corn, soy and wheat. Charity organizations like food banks hand out donations, which are often non-perishable, cheap, subsidized junk food.
Besides the fact that junk foods are much cheaper and do not provide nutritional value, obesity can also be a physiological response to hunger. In order to compensate for periodic food shortages, the body becomes more efficient at storing fat. United States child obesity has tripled since 1980, with 9.5 percent of infants and toddlers and 16.9 percent of children ages 2-19 considered obese. $147 billion was spent on obesity-related health care 2008, about 10 percent of the medical spending.
Although food banks and nonprofits do lots of work to assist people who are food-insecure, they can only provide short-term relief. This high rate of food insecurity results from unbalanced costs of foods and lack of aid to low-income families. Food insecurity needs to be addressed at the root of the cause. Hunger must be addressed politically.
Lara Lewison is a junior at Eastside Prepatory School in Kirkland.
