5 takeaways:
➀Food insecurity is about nutritional insecurity as well as a lack of calories. Tom Vilsack, in his second stint as secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said the debate about food needs to focus much more on what people are being fed – not just how much. “When we think about nutrition, I think we’re going to learn a lot more about our genetic makeups over the course of the next five, 10, 15, 20 years,” Vilsack said. “And as we learn, we’re going to learn that there are going to be specific diets that are more designed for people with condition A, and condition B. And I think we, at USDA, need to be thinking about our food programs in that context.”
➁ The USDA could do a better job getting eligible people to sign up for its programs. Through more than a dozen programs such as SNAP and WIC, the USDA spends $100 billion annually on food programs. But plenty of the people who could be helped are not enrolled. For example, the Government Accountability Office in 2018 found that more than half of potentially eligible college students were not enrolled in the SNAP program. Vilsack said that nearly 50% of those who are eligible for WIC are currently not participating in it.
➂ Food insecurity varies by state, and state efforts to tackle it are also uneven. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey measures food insecurity and has found it ranging from a low of 6.6% in New Hampshire to a high of 15.7% in Mississippi. (Data here.) In general, the highest rates of food insecurity are in the South; the lowest are in the Upper Midwest, New England and California. Vilsack said state efforts to address the problem are uneven as well. Many states, he said, don’t do what they should to educate their citizens about SNAP eligibility. “The result is that oftentimes states underperform in terms of access to this important program,” he said.
➃ Charitable organizations that address food insecurity have seen big increases since COVID-19. At Meals on Wheels of Metro Tulsa, president and CEO Calvin Moore said a normal year would see the group serving about 3,000 seniors. “This last year, we served well over 7,000 seniors,” said Moore, who is also on Meals on Wheels’ national board. Vince Hall, interim chief government relations officer at Feeding America, said the pandemic of the past year “combines the triple whammy of significantly increased demand for food, declines in donations of food and disruptions to the charitable food assistance systems operating model.” Demand on Feeding America’s food banks, food pantries and meal programs is about 55% higher than the pre-pandemic levels, he said.
➄ Reporters need to rethink how they report on food insecurity. Laura Reiley, who covers the business of food for The Washington Post, said that food insecurity was often thought of as an urban huger issue. But rural hunger is a huge problem as well – particularly among the rural elderly. There’s also a disconnect between what Americans see as the hunger problem and what Vilsack and others see as a nutrition problem. “There’s a huge lag between what the average American understands there,” she said. “They think of it as, ‘What’s the issue? Just get food in front of people.’”
This program was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
