I was wondering how 1 in 8 children could be experiencing food insecurity in a nation with a 40% obesity rate, and what food insecurity was exactly, so I poked around in their methodology a little.
Happy to be corrected if I'm misreading this. But if I understand correctly, they go into it on page 8, and there are basically two ways they calculate food insecurity.
The first is a weighted average of variables that are unrelated or indirectly related to food - including income, race and disability rate.
The second is self-reporting (basically asking households if they need more money for food).
Historically wealthy and high status people were "fatter" and had pale skin. It signaled that you had ready access to food and didn't work outside.
Now high status people are thin/muscular and have tanner skin - cheap and quick food is terrible for you and it signals you have the time to workout, pay for a trainer/gym membership, go on vacation to sunny destinations, aren't chained to a desk/working retail, can pay for and have access to high quality and fresh foods, etc.
More and more high quality and healthy food is expensive and/or requires more time to prepare and plan. If you're shuffling between multiple minimum wage jobs you're often eating fast food all day because you either can't afford or don't have time for anything better.
Then start looking at food deserts[0]. Stop at a bodega in a poor neighborhood that serves as the only food source around and prepare to be shocked at the absolute garbage they have available that's still covered by SNAP.
My kids go to a school where the majority of the kids are somewhere around poverty level (easy to be under there in Silicon Valley if you are not an engineer in tech).
I absolutely believe the administrators when they say that the meals some of the kids get in school might be the only ones they get for the day (by far not the majority: those are hard working parents, dedicated to their kids). And watching how much hand-holding is needed for some of the families on the pre-school-year paperwork day (back to school night) I am fully convinced that the worst-off kids are likely to wind up without food if their receiving it depends on their parents filling out forms.
And I want to be clear that the kids I think might be on the edge are not (in most cases) there because of neglect. They are there because living here is more expensive than their parents can afford completely, despite working long hours. That is a condemnation of a society that mis-appropriates the wealth (like on Engineers like me).
Yes, it is a waste of money that my kids (kids of a Silicon Valley Engineer) get their food for free, but looking at the alternative (kids going hungry), is it really that much of a waste?
I support free school lunch programs; no child should go hungry. But in California at least, many of the families with children who struggle with food insecurity entered the country illegally or with dubious claims of refugee status. That is a broader societal issue that can't be addressed through school funding or wealth redistribution.
If 1 in 8 kids experiences food insecurity, then it's likely that there are at least some, maybe 1 in 100, who are starving, however you define it.
Also, there are two kinds of starvation: in one case the quantity of food is insufficient, in the other its quality is. Eating fries with soda in great quantity every day could still starve a growing kid.
