Rural Hunger Is the Real Story
More than eight in ten of the counties with the highest food-insecurity rates in America are rural. The share of residents on SNAP is a different measure, and it's higher in some of Western North Carolina's rural counties: about one in seven in McDowell and about one in six in Rutherford, compared with about one in eleven in Buncombe. The need does not stop at the city limits.
Picture hunger in America and you probably see a city: a line outside a downtown soup kitchen, a crowded food pantry in a poor neighborhood. That's only part of the story. Most Americans who struggle to afford food live in or near cities, but rural counties make up more than their share of the counties with the highest rates of food insecurity. To learn how that term is defined and measured, see How to Think About Food Insecurity.
That pattern matters around here, because it's easy to mistake Asheville for the whole region. The breweries and the fully booked hotels make the city look like it's doing fine. A few ridgelines over, the picture changes fast.
Hunger in these mountains is most common in some of the rural counties around the city.
And the countryside comes out worse.
According to Feeding America's county-by-county estimates, about 86 percent of the counties with the highest food-insecurity rates in the United States are rural. But only about 62 percent of all counties are rural.
Feeding America's figures are estimates from a statistical model, and they're about two years old. So read them as the shape of the problem, not today's exact count. The shape is plain enough: in Western North Carolina, the highest rates are in rural mountain counties such as Rutherford and Swain.
You don't need a national map to see the difference. It shows up within an hour's drive of Asheville.
In Buncombe, the county around the city, about 25,000 of some 280,000 residents are on SNAP, roughly one in eleven. In five of the seven counties that border it, the share is higher: about one in seven in McDowell and about one in six in Rutherford. Farther west, in Graham County, it's also about one in seven. In Henderson and Transylvania, two neighbors to the south, the share is below Buncombe's.
Share of residents on SNAP
Buncombe and six other counties, August 2026. Drawn to scale.
About 25,000 of Buncombe's roughly 280,000 residents are on SNAP as of August 2026, close to one in eleven (our own calculation). The count rose to about 31,000 in December 2024, after Helene. It fell to about 29,000 by April 2025 and about 27,400 by June 2025. It held near that level through September 2025, then fell again. In the other counties on the chart, the share runs from below Buncombe's in Transylvania to about one in six in Rutherford. Sources: NCDHHS county caseload (August 2026) and U.S. Census Bureau county population estimates.
SNAP numbers count the people who sign up, not everyone who struggles to afford food, so they aren't the same measure as the food-insecurity rate. In the newest county estimates, for 2024, Buncombe's food-insecurity rate was about 17 percent, above the national rate of about 14 percent. Four of the seven counties that border Buncombe had even higher rates, up to about 19 percent in Rutherford. Madison matched Buncombe, and Henderson and Transylvania were slightly lower. By this measure Buncombe sits near the middle of the mountain counties around it.
Three things make rural hunger worse, and Hurricane Helene hit all three.
The first is the store. Wide stretches of the counties around Buncombe are food deserts, where the closest supermarket is many miles and one working car away. That can be a 30-minute drive on mountain roads, if the nearest town still has a full grocery store at all. When the only grocery in a small town closes, there's no other store down the street. Helene made that real even inside Buncombe County. In Swannanoa, about 15 minutes east of Asheville, the storm knocked out the Ingles, the town's only grocery store. In October 2025, residents with cars drove to Black Mountain for groceries, and those without faced a long bus ride. As of September 2026, the store hadn't reopened.
The second is income. In rural areas, incomes are lower, and work is more scarce and more seasonal. Here, too, average pay in several rural counties is below Buncombe's. The storm cut tourism jobs and destroyed crops at the same time.
The third is the road. Distance is itself a cost, paid in gas and time by the people who can least spare either. When Helene washed out highways and bridges, it cut some communities off from food entirely for weeks. In the most remote places, the repairs still aren't finished. A flood that was hard in Asheville was isolating in the hollows.
A city that looks well off can give people the wrong idea.
In Asheville, the tourists, the food scene and the cranes on the skyline make it easy to assume the region has hunger under control. Food-insecurity rates are higher in most of the counties around Buncombe, where fewer people live. A lower rate in Buncombe does not mean Western North Carolina is doing fine. The work we care about does not stop at the county line.
The need does not stop at the city limits.
In this country, hunger is more common in rural areas, even though most of the people who struggle to afford food live in or near cities. Several counties outside the Asheville metro area have higher food-insecurity rates than Buncombe. In Feeding America's estimates for 2024, Rutherford, Swain, Jackson, Mitchell, Yancey and McDowell were all about 18 to 19 percent, compared with about 17 percent in Buncombe.
Rural hunger rises and falls with decisions about whether a small-town grocery can survive, how rural wages are set, whether a washed-out road gets rebuilt, and how far SNAP reaches into the hollows. The story that Asheville is doing fine doesn't hold up even in Buncombe, where the food-insecurity rate is higher than the national one. The city is the wrong place to stop looking.
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