Nearly 15% of U.S. Households Were Hungry in 2011

The U.S. Department of Agriculture today released its annual report on household food security in the United States in 2011. The study found that 14.9% of American households “had difficulty at some time during the year providing food for all their members due to a lack of resources.” The percentage is slightly higher than the 14.5% reported in 2010, but the USDA says the change is statistically insignificant and may be due to variations in sampling.

Among the study’s other findings:

• 5.7% of U.S. households (6.8 million households and one-third of all food-insecure households) had very low food security, marking a return to the food-insecure levels of 2008 and 2009.
• Children were food insecure at times during 2011 in 10% of households with children (3.9 million total households with children).
• Among households with very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months during 2011 for a few days each month.
• 57% of food-insecure households reported that in the previous month they had participated one of the three largest federal food and nutrition assistance programs.

A summary of the study is available here and the full results are available here.

Paul Ausick