According to a new report commissioned by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), as of July, the number of people who said they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat has skyrocketed to 29 million, or 11 percent of adults in the United States. (By comparison, 8 million adults, or around 4 percent, did not have enough to eat in 2018.) In 38 states and Washington, D.C., more than one in ten adults with children had inadequate amounts of food, with the highest rates of hunger in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas…
Now, new data from the Census Bureau, referenced in the report, shows that even America’s middle class is now reckoning with hunger. Two years ago, only 3 percent of adults earning between $50,000 and $75,000 a year said they did not have enough to eat; during the pandemic, that rose to 8 percent. Similarly, 5 percent of adults earning between $35,000 and $50,000 reported that hunger in 2018; now, it is 12 percent.
https://thecounter.org/covid-19-hunger-food-insecurity-crisis-america/
This statistic first didn’t make sense to me, since the majority of people are obese. But I guess when you have to have a caveat when you say people don’t have enough to eat. They don’t have enough of the right type of food to eat. They probably live in food deserts and are living on prepackaged snack food.
I wouldn’t think the children would have so much food insecurity, since they are fed breakfast and lunch, at least around here 12 months a year.
Here’s the link to the organization that put the study together. There’s a link to download the full report in pdf. The accuracy of any research like this depends both on definitions and methodology. Is the number 29 million accurate? Probably not. But the study does raise awareness of how many are struggling now. https://frac.org/research/resource-library/not-enough-to-eat-communications-toolkit