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How to Think About Food Insecurity
Five short essays to read in order. Each essay starts with a story we tell about hunger, gives it a fair hearing, and then asks what the numbers actually show. We tend to explain hunger as a story about the person: the poor budgeting, the bad habits, the help they supposedly won't ask for.
These five essays share one idea. Almost every argument about hunger tangles two questions into one. Why does this family run short of food this month? And what determines the number of food-insecure people in this county?
A hard stretch (a shift that got cut, a medical bill, a car that died) goes a long way toward answering the first question. It says almost nothing about the second. The answer to that one is something steadier: the gap between what households bring in and what food, rent, and everything else now costs. One thing explains who. A different thing explains how many.
The size of the gap is a choice, and so is the number. That's the thread that runs through all five.
Two terms in these essays have exact meanings. Food insecurity is measured with a survey, and it's not another word for hunger. SNAP is a federal food benefit that stops at a set income level, so it doesn't reach everyone going without. To learn how both terms are defined, see Words the Agencies Use.
Hunger is a question of how many, not who.
The first two essays each take on a version of the same belief: that hunger is, fundamentally, a story about the people who go without. Every part of that story is real in someone's life, and none of it explains how many people go without. According to Feeding America's estimate, nearly half of food-insecure Americans may have had incomes too high to qualify for SNAP in 2024. Feeding America also notes that some food-insecure people have jobs. What the numbers show isn't the hunger we tend to picture.
The number of food-insecure people is determined by the same gap that drives homelessness. On the food side, that gap shows up sooner and reaches more people: cutting back on groceries, skipping meals at the end of the month, going to a food pantry for the first time. And like the homeless count, the number of food-insecure people moves when we decide to move it. We should fund both food banks and SNAP. But for every meal Feeding America's food banks provide, SNAP provides nine, so we should stop asking the smaller of the two to carry the whole load.
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