How many people in the United States have trouble buying enough food for their households? The number is surely larger than zero, but beyond that, we’ll never know more because the federal surveys that measure “food insecurity” are so hopelessly skewed, as to be useless.
James Bovard looks at the details:
Over the past 15 years federal surveys have profoundly muddled Americans’ understanding of the hunger problem. During the Clinton administration, the USDA began using a “food insecurity” survey that had been initially created by the Food Research Action Center (FRAC), a left-wing advocacy organization renowned for hyping hunger. FRAC’s goal is to vastly increase the number of Americans receiving government food aid — and it slanted the questions accordingly.
One of the USDA’s surveys’ preliminary screening question asks, “In the last 12 months, did you ever run short of money and try to make your food or your food money go further?” Why should we be concerned that shoppers want their food dollars to go further? That was formerly taught as a virtue in high-school home-economics classes. Now it is a pretext for federal alarm.
The USDA defines food insecurity for a family as being “uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.” The USDA noted, “For most food-insecure households, the inadequacies were in the form of reduced quality and variety rather than insufficient quantity.”
“Worry” about being able to buy sufficient food is the number-one source of food insecurity. If someone states that he feared running out of food for a single day (but didn’t run out), that is an indicator of being “food insecure” for the entire year — regardless of whether he ever missed a single meal. If someone felt he needed organic kale but could only afford conventional kale, that is another “food insecure” indicator. If an obese person felt he needed 5,000 calories a day but could only afford 4,800 calories, he could be labeled “food insecure.”
The solution to the problem, we’re told, is never greater worker productivity (and thus higher real wages) achieved through less regulation, or to end a monetary policy that favors the wealthy over the poor. Nope, it’s just more government spending on food stamps.
But at the same time that we’re told more money must be spent on food stamps, we’re then told that even more must be spent to combat obesity.
