Say Anything Blog

Sigh…

While Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said programs such as food stamps softened the impact of an economic recession, anti-hunger groups pointed to the huge increase from the preceding year when 36.2 million people had trouble getting enough food and a third of them occasionally went hungry.

“The survey suggested that things could be much worse but for the fact that we have extensive food assistance programs,” Vilsack told reporters. “This is a great opportunity to put a spotlight on this problem.”

About 14.6 percent of U.S. households, equal to 49.1 million people, “had difficulty obtaining food for all their members due to a lack of resources” during 2008, up 3.5 percentage points from 2007 when 11.1 percent of households were classified as food insecure.

About 5.7 percent of households, or 17.3 million people, had “very low food security,” meaning some members of the household had to eat less. Typically, food runs short in those households for a few days in seven or eight months of the year, USDA said.

President Barack Obama called the USDA report “unsettling” and vowed to reverse the trend of rising hunger.

And so begins the exploitation of yet another “crisis” for the sake of expanding government power, taxation and spending.

But there are some serious problems with this study.  Such as the definitions used for who is and is not “food secure.”

In the survery, households were counted as having low food security if they reported, for instance, that in the past year they had been “worried whether [their] food would run out before [they] got money to buy more.”

This is a good description of an obviously very unsatisfying condition: a feeling of insecurity concerning food. But it does not imply and must not be confused with actual insecurity concerning food, i.e., actual threats to one’s ability to afford food.

Other criteria were the incapacity to afford “balanced meals,” or the need to rely on a “few kinds of low-cost food.” Moreover, such conditions need not be a household’s constant situation, but only the case “sometimes” during the past year.

Once again, a feeling of insecurity, or the dependence on cheap food is certainly very undesirable. Still, it seems an outright lie to describe as “struggling with hunger” those households (accounting for two-thirds of all food-insecure households) which reported “few, if any, indications of reduced food intake” at anytime during the year.

Put simply, feeling uncertain about your food supply is not the same thing as going hungry.  And then there’s this:

One would expect food insecurity to be closely linked to household resources. However, half of the households categorized as having very low food security have incomes well above the poverty line.[6] “On the other hand,” the 2005 report states, “many low-income households (including almost two-thirds of those with incomes below the official poverty line) were food secure.” Indeed, only 15 percent of households with incomes below the poverty line have very low food security.[7]

This means that 2 percent of all American households sometimes feel the “usual uneasy sensation” of hunger due to a lack of economic resources — and the vast majority of those with children manage to spare them from hunger.[8]

Certainly, this constitutes a problem; even more certainly, the truth is far from the collective-emergency myth that “one in eight Americans is struggling with hunger.”

Given that no society is perfect, and that a utopia where everyone has everything they need all the time is an unachievable pipe dream, I’d say that 2% of our American households sometimes feeling a little uneasy about maybe going hungry is a success story.  A testament to the resiliency and prosperity afforded by our free market economic system.

Of course, nobody likes that anybody goes hungry.  But we’ve reached a point in this country, the breadbasket of the world, where statistically pretty nobody is going hungry.