Food Insecurity Is a Bigger Problem Than Our Government Thinks
By Alice Reznickova
If you’ve been following my blog for the past six months, you probably know national food insecurity rates by heart. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), 10% of households in the United States were not sure where their next meal was going to come from in 2021. Among Black households, it was 20%, and among Hispanic households, 16%. But how do we know this—and do these numbers accurately represent the experiences of households across the United States?
It turns out that we don’t actually know current food insecurity levels—at least not based on federal government sources. The federal government only reports food insecurity data once a year, but new research shows that if people are asked about food insecurity on a monthly basis, the rates go up by one-third. Food insecurity measurements also do not take into account where households get their food, masking the essential role public benefits and food pantries play in supporting families. Finally, the data only tell us if people ate enough food—not whether the food was healthy for the people who ate it, or for the environment.
In this blog, I will take you through the science of measuring food insecurity in the United States and explain how the current measurements severely downplay the experience of people who are struggling. We need a new measurement of food insecurity to address these issues, but we also need to advocate for solutions that address the root causes of food insecurity.
We don’t measure frequently enough
Every time I have written about food insecurity since my first blog post in November 2022, I have used the same statistic. This is because the USDA only surveys food insecurity once a year (each December), via a supplement to its monthly Current Population Survey, then publishes a summary report such as this one the following September. The numbers I am able to cite now, in May 2023, were published in September 2022, citing research from December 2021.
Of course, a lot has happened since December 2021. We were still in the middle of the COVID-19 public health emergency, to which the federal government responded by expanding public benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This was before consumers were hit hard by inflation that drove food prices up steeply, and before the government ended the expanded SNAP benefits prematurely this past March. To understand how households experienced inflation and the reduction in SNAP benefits, we will have to wait for the USDA’s September 2024 report.
In addition to this delay in data collection and analysis, food insecurity is likely underreported. The USDA relies on questions that ask households to recall whether they had enough to eat over the course of an entire year. But as noted above, a new study released last month showed that when asked almost monthly, about a third of the participants who reported food insecurity in earlier months did not report it in a final survey that asked about food insecurity during the past 12 months.
How can policymakers address an emergency like hunger if they do not have accurate, up-to-date information? We know it is possible for the federal government to collect data more frequently: the Household Pulse Survey, for instance, collects data every week in order to understand the impact of the pandemic on various aspects of people’s lives, including housing, employment, transportation, and food sufficiency. Though the latter measurement provides limited information compared with the USDA’s multiple criteria for determining food security, it at least shows that the government is capable of collecting this kind of data on a regular basis.
Food banks and pantries also collect some data, but their measurements are often site-specific and measure food insecurity indirectly, in terms of visits to pantries and pounds of food distributed. While food banks and pantries do not capture food insecurity directly, they do offer personal stories from community members, which counteract what we are seeing in the national data. Despite food insecurity hovering around 10% to 11% between 2019 and 2021, during the recent emergencies, food banks and pantries experienced long lines and were worried about running out of food. Feeding America reports that in 2021, 53 million people turned to food banks, one-third more than before the pandemic. The recent “hunger cliff” led to more people seeking food pantry help—in some cases, more than during the pandemic.