“Economic Characteristics of the Food Insecure,” a fresh data dump from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is convincing.
And frustrating.
Americans hardly need a reminder that our bellies aren’t bare. Whether it’s called “hunger” or “food insecurity” — we’ll explore the difference below — the United States is desperate for action on real problems.
But perhaps another trip down Obvious Boulevard is necessary, to combat all the hype and media bias. A decade and a half ago, Charles Lane, of The Washington Post — seriously! — railed against his colleagues’ eager parroting of activists’ implication “that famine stalks the land.” Food was “so readily available,” the MSMer wrote, an Emory University professor believed that “if present trends” continued, “43 percent of Americans will be obese by 2018.”
The prediction proved too pessimistic — but not by much. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, “unique among nationwide health surveys in the United States, combining in-person interviews with standardized physical examinations and laboratory tests,” found that between 2017 and 2020, the share of “adults aged 20 and over with obesity” was 41.9 percent.
We’ve never known more about how to combat corpulency, but we’ve never been fatter. And, it can safely be alleged, we’ve never heard more about the travails of the “food insecure.”
In her paper, Angela Rachidi, an AEI senior fellow, explains that the U.S. Department of Agriculture “developed a survey-based method to measure food hardship in the 1990s.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics began to insert the Food Security Supplement (FSS) “once per year into its monthly Current Population Survey … the official data source used for government statistics on unemployment, income, and poverty.”
Food insecurity is not, as the dishonest screechers at Feeding America wail, “when people don’t have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from.” As Rachidi details, the FSS scores its survey
on a continuous scale. Depending on households’ responses … they can be classified as food secure, low food secure, or very low food secure. At the low end of severity, food-insecure households “feel anxiety about the sufficiency of their food to meet basic needs and make adjustments to their food budget and food served.” At more extreme levels of food insecurity, household members go without eating or skip meals.
With much subjectivity baked (sorry) into the FSS, it’s not surprising that the supplement’s results can be mystifying. For example, Rachidi concluded that “a sizable share of food-secure households have incomes at the bottom of the distribution, with similar incomes to many food-insecure households.” Furthermore, “relatively large proportions of the food insecure have household incomes that seemingly place them in the middle class or higher.”
Don’t have enough to eat? Don’t know where the next meal will come from? Yeah, in America, that’s not really a thing.
If the ravages of malnutrition were afflicting a large number of low-income Americans, one would assume that “the poor” make wise choices at the supermarket. That is not the case.
In 2017, an analysis of food-stamp beneficiaries’ purchases at a “leading grocery retailer” yielded a jaw-dropping revelation. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) households devoted 5.44 percent of their expenditures to soft drinks — a portion that beat milk (3.85 percent), fresh chicken (1.85 percent) water (1.17 percent), and potatoes (0.74 percent). Food-stamp “families” spent substantially more on soda than non-SNAP households, which held their liquid-candy bill down to 4.01 percent.
Coffin nails should be eschewed by folks at food-security risk, right? (Every penny counts!) Then why are residents of low-income households 67 percent likelier to consume tobacco products than their affluent neighbors? (According to a 2022 study published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research: “Medicaid fee-for-service beneficiaries who tried to quit smoking cigarettes rarely accessed cessation medication or counseling despite the wide range of cessation treatments that Medicaid covers.”)
What about the children? Good question. The latest edition of What We Eat in America provides an answer. For those between the ages of 2 and 19 who live in households earning beneath 131 percent of the poverty level, caloric consumption is greater than it is for young people at 350 percent of poverty and higher.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that the “surge in grocery prices” since 2020 “has been stunning: up more than 25%, a full 5 percentage points more than consumer prices overall.” But blame the Lockdown and D.C.’s Magic Money Machine for pain in the pantry. America’s utter disregard for the “needy” isn’t starving its “underserved communities.” If anything, it’s killing them with a grotesque form of kindness.
Marxist Socialist Communists will let there citizens get as fat as they want on junk food and then let them all die of diabetes!! Or they simply starve them and let them die that way!! That's what we have in Russia and the US!! Although, Russians are probably in better shape than Americans are today. One only has to look at the Democrat Fund Raiser at the NY Radio City Music Hall and see their two star performers, Queen Latifah and Lizzo, to see what kind of people the Democrats like to show off at their fund raisers! IOW, the Fatter the better!! That's not Phat, it's FAT!! I guess D-E-I loves F-A-T!!!
As others have pointed out, look at the pictures of the people who attended Woodstock in 1969 compared to what Americans look like today. I'm a world traveler and have never seen obesity in any other country comparable to the U.S.