The City Where People Don’t Have Enough to Eat

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jul 12, 9:12AM EDT · Published Jul 11, 10:38AM EDT

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The City Where People Don’t Have Enough to Eat — © Photo by Mario B. via Yelp

“Food insecurity” is defined by The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as “lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life.” Nonprofit Feeding America claims the number of people who fall into this category numbers 1 in 9 Americans. It adds this figure includes 11 million children. There is at least some evidence that in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic the sudden recession brought on by the disease increased the number of people how faced food insecurity nationwide.

The Census Bureau started to look at the effects of COVID-19 on the American population early in the pandemic. Its vast initiative is called the Household Pulse Survey. So far, the results have been released in three phases, which began with the first study that was in the field starting April 23, 2020. The data is released about twice a month. The work is done in partnership with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Housing and Urban Development, National Center for Education Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics, Social Security Administration and USDA Economic Research Service.

The Household Pulse Survey has a section called “Food Scarcity.” It is based on a measure of “Percentage of adults in households where there was either sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last 7 days.” The number varies by city and state. For example, the state with the highest percentage is Alabama at 17.4%. The state with the lowest number is Wisconsin at 4.1%.
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Among America’s major metro areas, the place where food insecurity is most widespread is Riverside, California, with a figure of 13.9%. It is followed by a metro nearby geographically. The second-place city is Los Angeles at 12%. The national figure is 9.7%.

Click here to read about places where poverty is causing bad diets.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.