Hunger In America
Why Food Insecurity Is Increasing... Part I
“Almost 25% of American adults are food insecure, a jump of about five percentage points from a year earlier as the double whammy of high inflation and the end of pandemic benefits squeezes more household budgets, according to a new study.” CBS News, MoneyWatch. March 21, 2023
I wrote a few months ago about the proliferation of “Dollar Stores” around the country and the impact this dramatic increase has had on surrounding communities. In fact, many towns are explicitly banning these and similar discount retailers because of their negative effect on locally owned stores and products. A New York Times article noted the following growth statistic:
More than one-third of all stores that opened in the United States in 2021 and 2022 were dollar stores. Dollar General alone opened 2,060 locations during those years, far more than any other retailer…
Dollar General is in the news again, but this time for its recent earnings report that sent its shares tumbling: On June 1, its stock fell 20% after it forecast a future earnings loss of 8%, year over year. What the company learned is that its core customer base, those earning less than $40,000 a year, could no longer afford its supposedly rock bottom prices and were turning to food banks instead. Unfortunately, some experts see this as bad news for the economy as a whole.
The factors impacting this trend toward heavier reliance on charitable food banks start with inflation — food prices have surged a whopping 20% over the past two years (and up at least 13.5 % for the year ending August, 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics),1 and combined with the end of pandemic supplemental food stamp money which ended March 1 of this year, and the rising cost of housing and other necessities, our economy continues to squeeze lower income Americans. If you or your family hovers near the federal poverty level or drops below it, you have to give up something and that something is often food—today over 34 million Americans, including 9 million children live with food insecurity.
This is part one of a several part series of posts I intend to write on hunger in America. Today, I’m giving you a bit of background and recommending a few articles that discuss the increasing number of both adults and children in our country who are food insecure, and start to explore the reasons why. And in the next post or two I plan to conduct interviews with those working to end food insecurity in the United States to bring you their perspective, directly.
— First up is a 2022 blog post by a national campaign called “No Kid Hungry”, run by the non-profit organization, Share our Strength, that discusses what food insecurity means and why the number of hungry children in the U.S. is increasing.
1 in 8 kids in the United States are living with hunger. That's 9 million children… Hunger is not something we can measure; it's something we experience. Instead, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) measures "food insecurity".
Households that are food insecure are those that struggled to provide enough food for everyone living there at some point during the year. A child living in a food-insecure household might not get enough food to eat. Or her mother may have to skip meals to feed her. Or the family may have enough to eat one month, but not the next.
In all these cases, that child is living with hunger.
— This is a detailed, nuanced piece from NPR, published in fall, 2022 and includes an audio version of the story. It not only discusses the hurdles people face to receive the food and other government assistance they’re entitled to, but the tragic circumstances that can plunge nearly anyone into poverty and food insecurity. You have to be incredibly wealthy or just lucky to escape a sudden, bad turn of events.
"Living in poverty makes you sicker or causes you to become sick if you aren't and it's hard to get out of," Thomas [a woman featured in the story] said. "No matter how long you live in it, it causes trauma," she added, noting the stress caused her and her husband to develop PTSD, bringing her lupus and rheumatoid arthritis out of remission. The trauma in turn trickled down to the children, whose health has also "gone downhill."
— A final reading for today’s post is an alarming article from Vox published just a few months ago. This is a must read because if you were wondering about why food prices were continuing to rise, despite the overall inflation rate trending slightly downward over the last six months, you’ve got your explanation here. It’s what many economists have been saying for the last two years: companies, particularly among those businesses that lack serious competiton (like the food industry), have used the cover of what could have been temporary inflation, to continue hiking their prices and generating over-the-top profits…on the backs of the approximately one quarter of American adults and 9 million children experiencing food insecurity today.
“Corporate profits have hit their highest level ever, and corporate profit margins — how much they’re making on each unit that they’re selling — have hit the highest level in 70 years,” said Chris Becker, senior economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic advocacy organization.
And here’s one example from this article:
Packaged foods manufacturer General Mills, which owns a variety of cereal brands as well as food brands like Annie’s, Betty Crocker, Chex, and Bisquick, has raised prices five times since 2021 and indicated another price hike could be coming soon. At the end of last year, its profits were up 97 percent compared to the previous quarter, and up 16 percent annually.
The cruel, ironic part of this scenario is that when our government steps in to help those in need with an increase in food stamp benefits for example, like it did during the pandemic, and does so without curtailing prices or taxing companies’ windfall profits, the government is subsidizing these same corporate profits. And that is a lose-lose situation for the taxpayer.
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What are your thoughts about the increase of food insecurity in America in recent years? Have you faced food insecurity or made tradeoffs to eat? How about the hideous corporate profits of the food industry while millions of adults and children go hungry? Please share your ideas in the Comment Section, below.
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