Nearly 15% of U.S. Households Were Hungry in 2011

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By Paul Ausick Published
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture today released its annual report on household food security in the United States in 2011. The study found that 14.9% of American households “had difficulty at some time during the year providing food for all their members due to a lack of resources.” The percentage is slightly higher than the 14.5% reported in 2010, but the USDA says the change is statistically insignificant and may be due to variations in sampling.

Among the study’s other findings:

  • 5.7% of U.S. households (6.8 million households and one-third of all food-insecure households) had very low food security, marking a return to the food-insecure levels of 2008 and 2009.
  • Children were food insecure at times during 2011 in 10% of households with children (3.9 million total households with children).
  • Among households with very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months during 2011 for a few days each month.
  • 57% of food-insecure households reported that in the previous month they had participated one of the three largest federal food and nutrition assistance programs.

A summary of the study is available here and the full results are available here.

Paul Ausick

Photo of Paul Ausick
About the Author Paul Ausick →

Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.

He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.

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