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Food insecurity on slight downward trend

The USDA says food insecurity is on a downward trend.  An Economic Research Service report indicates 12.3 percent of households were food insecure in 2016.

“The prevalence of food insecurity is essentially unchanged from 2015,” said sociologist Alisha Coleman-Jensen at the Economic Research Service, one of the authors of the study, in an interview provided by the USDA.  The decrease was only four-tenths of one percentage point, added Coleman-Jensen.

“But it’s continuing a downward trend in food insecurity from a peak in 2011,” she said.  That year, nearly 15 percent of households were food insecure.

“So we know that the Federal nutrition programs, like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program), school meals, WIC (Women Infants and Children), they work to reduce hunger and food insecurity in this country,” said Lucy Melcher, who is with the No Kid Hungry campaign to end child hunger.

There are still a lot of food insecure and hungry people in the U.S., and not every subset of the food insecure is in decline.  For instance, 2016 saw a slight increase in households with very low food security among children, according to Coleman-Jensen.

“And households with very low food security reported that normal eating patterns of some household members were disrupted at times during the year,” said Coleman-Jensen, “and their food intake reduced below levels they considered appropriate.”

The report says that in 2016, food secure households spent almost 30 percent more on food than comparable food insecure households.  In 2016, about 60 percent of food insecure households participated in Federal food assistance.