Five short pieces, read in order. We tend to explain hunger as a story about the person: the poor budgeting, the bad habits, the help they supposedly will not seek. Each piece here takes one of those stories seriously, then asks what the numbers actually show.
These five pieces share one idea, and it is worth stating plainly before you start. There are two different questions tangled together in almost every argument about hunger. The first is why a particular family runs short of food this month. The second is why a particular county has the number of hungry people it does.
A hard stretch (a cut shift, a medical bill, a car that died) goes a long way toward answering the first. It says almost nothing about the second. The size of the number is set by something steadier: the gap between what the lowest earners bring home and what food, rent, and everything else now costs. One thing decides who. A different thing decides how many.
A gap opened by policy can be closed by policy. That is the thread running under all five.
The companion question to homelessness. What food insecurity is, what it is not, and why the count in a county is set less by anyone's character than by arithmetic we can change.
Read →More than two in five food-insecure Americans, an estimated 21 million people, likely earn too much to qualify for SNAP. They make too much for help and too little for groceries, and they are the part of hunger we are trained not to picture.
Read →Nearly nine in ten of the counties with the worst food insecurity in America are rural. Drive twenty minutes out of Asheville and the share of residents on food assistance doubles or triples. The crisis gets worse the moment the city ends.
Read →They are essential, and they cannot end hunger, because the arithmetic will not let them. For every meal the charitable system provides, the federal benefit provides nine. Saying so is the strongest case for giving to a food bank, and for refusing to let it stand alone.
Read →This site writes about homelessness and hunger as if they were two subjects. They are one: a single web of who can afford to live here and who cannot, read early at the grocery store and late at the curb.
Read →Most of these pieces take on a version of the same belief: that hunger is, at bottom, a story about the people who go without. The poor planning. The bad habits. The help they supposedly will not seek. Every one of those is real in some life, and not one of them explains the count. More than two in five food-insecure Americans earn too much to qualify for SNAP, and many of them work. The hunger we are trained to picture is not the hunger the data find.
The number is set by the same gap that drives homelessness, read earlier and wider: a thinner cart, a skipped meal, a longer line at the pantry. And like the housing number, it moves when we decide to move it. For every meal charity provides, the federal benefit provides nine. That is not a knock on the food bank. It is the reason to fund both the pantry and the policy, and to stop asking the smaller of the two to carry the whole load.