Hunger problem challenges U.S.

This week, Congress considers new food stamp rules that would allow people to receive more aid.

By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 11, 2007 edition

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Atlanta - On some days, Taquana Spicer admits, she skips breakfast and lunch to make sure that her three kids – Nakhema, 11; Isaiah, 7; and Jahsir, 2 – have enough to eat.

Ms. Spicer's bouts of hunger, she says, are tempered by another decision she made: to raise her children in the suburbs rather than in the kind of rundown projects where she grew up.

"It's a sacrifice, a choice. I won't just move anywhere," says Ms. Spicer, who lives in Riverdale, Ga., outside Atlanta. "It's like either do I live out here and juggle my bills, or do I live in the projects and risk their life every day?"

As Spicer's plight indicates, hunger remains a complex problem in America, fraught with issues of personal responsibility and even upward mobility. The issue is getting renewed attention this week as Congress considers new food stamp rules that would allow recipients to make larger income deductions to qualify for more aid. It's prompting debate over who is going hungry, who is not, and what the word means in a country where the poor, on average, weigh more than the rich.

"Being hungry is a subtle, personal, chaotic, unpredictable, but often systematic experience," where welfare policies may provide a meal but don't go far enough to help poor Americans rise above welfare says Amy Glasmeier, director of Penn State's Center for Policy Research on Energy, Environment and Community Well-being in University Park, Pa.

Some 35.5 million Americans are food insecure, or have cupboards that are sometimes bare, according to the US Department of Agriculture's household food security report released in November. Of 115 million US households, 230,000 reported children going hungry at some point almost every month; 115,000 households, or 0.1 percent of all US households, reported that a child had not eaten all day at least once during the year.

But some say these numbers don't reveal the full picture. It "is made difficult by the fact that there isn't any common language for specific levels of food stress," says Mark Nord, a USDA sociologist and chief tracker of hunger trends. "The best popular description for food insecure households are those having trouble at times putting enough food on the table. Many avoid being hungry ... by cutting down on quality, variety, desirability of diets, and perhaps by getting assistance here and there. It's certainly wrong to characterize all of the people who live in those houses as hungry."

These statistics undercount the number of Americans who have experienced hunger in a given year, says Kathleen Gorman, director of the Center for a Hunger-Free America in Kingston, R.I.

For one, America's 744,000 chronically homeless are not counted in the food security survey, and neither are people living on Indian reservations. Hunger among the elderly may also be underreported, experts say, in part because of how older people experience and explain the physical effects of hunger.

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