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Article Excerpt
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) monitors annually the food security of U.S. households. This monitoring includes calculating the share of households that are food insecure--meaning that they had difficulty at times during the year having enough to eat--and the share of households in which people were hungry at times during the year because of their food insecurity. The USDA reports these statistics for the Nation and for each State (Nord, Jemison, & Bickel, 1999; Nord, Andrews, & Carlson, 2002).
The USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) uses these statistics to assess the level of need for its food assistance programs and to measure their performance. Advocates for programs that serve low-income families have used these statistics to call for a variety of policy initiatives. The Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a prominent national organization seeking to end hunger, recently urged Congress to authorize additional funding for the Summer Nutrition and School Lunch Programs (Food Research and Action Center, 2003b). America's Second Harvest, the Nation's largest hunger-relief organization, has also relied on the USDA's hunger estimates in supporting efforts to alleviate hunger (America's Second Harvest, 2002).
State government agencies and the media have used the USDA's State-level statistics to draw attention to the problem of hunger. In Idaho and Tennessee, newspaper editorial boards have taken the opportunity to use hunger estimates to suggest policy (Idaho Statesman, 2002; Cooper, 2002). The State-level estimates have received considerable attention in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in Oregon, where posted rates have been at or near the top of the USDA's hunger rankings (Graves, 2002; Harrison, 2002; Cook, 2002). In spring 2003, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski convened a hunger summit and discussed possible solutions with human service providers, business executives, and academic experts and has since made the eradication of hunger a top priority of his administration. Subsequently, the Governor announced a strategic plan--principally focused on job creation--to reduce the State's hunger rate. However, with no precise information about how job growth or unemployment relates to hunger, the Governor was unable to predict the degree to which his approach would affect the State's hunger rate, if at all (Kulongoski, 2003).
The high hunger rates of Oregon and its Northwest neighbors (Washington and Idaho) have surprised policymakers and the Federal officials who oversee USDA's Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS) (Nord et al., 1999). A definitive explanation linking State prevalence rates of hunger to State-level characteristics such as poverty, employment, and per capita income has not emerged. Because the underlying reasons have--to this point--gone unexplained, policy responses have been hampered and some observers have challenged methods used in the survey and deemed the USDA's findings inaccurate or misleading (Charles, 2003).
In this article, we examined the effects of State-level economic and demographic characteristics on State prevalence rates of food insecurity and hunger. Using food-security data and Census data of all 50 States and the District of Columbia, we first estimated the associations of food insecurity and hunger with a small number of carefully chosen State-level factors. Based on these associations, we then examined the extent to which these factors explained the high rate of hunger in Oregon and, as a contrast, the lower-than-expected rate of hunger in West Virginia.
Background
In 1990, Congress enacted the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act (U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA], 2002a). Under the national plan mandated by this Act, the USDA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) formed the Food Security Measurement Project. Several Federal agencies, as well as academic and private researchers, worked as a team to develop standardized measures of household food security that could be used nationally as well as in State and local surveys.
The team working on the Food Security Measurement Project used, as its starting point, the definitions of food security, food insecurity, and hunger established by the American Institute of Nutrition (Anderson, 1990). Whereas food security means assured access by all people at all times to enough food for active, healthy lives, food insecurity means limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways (Anderson, 1990). (1) Hunger refers to the uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food. As measured and described by the project, hunger refers specifically to hunger that results from food insecurity (USDA, 2003b).
Based on these definitions and earlier research, the members of the project developed a series of questions about behaviors and experiences known to characterize households that are having difficulty obtaining enough food. These questions (i.e., the U.S. Food Security Survey Module) are included in an annual nationally representative survey as a supplement to the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) of the U.S. Census Bureau. Based on the number of food-insecure conditions they report, surveyed households are identified as food secure, food insecure without hunger, or food insecure with hunger.
A large and rapidly expanding body of research has examined causes of food insecurity and food insufficiency (a related measure based on a single question used in earlier surveys). To date, however, almost all of this research has...
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