What Is It Like To Be Hungry?
“Hunger” is an evocative word. Everyone understands what it feels like to be hungry. Our stomachs start rumbling. We get irritable. It becomes hard to think straight. To make those symptoms go away, we eat something. Our stomachs are full, and we are content.
Over 44 million Americans face hunger each and every day including 1 in 5 children. If we think about hunger as most of us experience it, as a temporary sensation, the solution to this problem is straightforward: we just need to get more food to people who don’t have enough.
Food banks, shelters, and soup kitchens may seem like the answer to hunger in America. They are, however, a short-term and inadequate response. There has been a stunning increase in the number of emergency food programs over the last 40 years. In 1980, there were about 2 dozen food banks in the United States.
Today, there are more than 400, which serve 63,000 affiliated pantries and shelters. The growth of the emergency food system, however, has failed to solve “hunger.” Despite a spike during the Great Recession and during the pandemic, the prevalence of food insecurity has remained relatively constant over the past 28 years. In 2021, over 10% of households were food insecure, which is only slightly below the 11.9% rate that was recorded in 1995, the year the federal government started keeping statistics.
According to Feeding America, 72% of the households served by its affiliated food banks live at or below 100% of the federal poverty line and have a median annual household income of $9,175. In short, they don’t have enough money to consistently put food on the table. While unemployment is certainly a significant factor, 54% of the households Feeding America serves had at least 1 person employed in the past year.
In fact, most Americans are working harder than ever, but are still struggling to make ends meet. Income inequality has, by almost any measure, increased exponentially over the past 40+ years. Since 1980, most of the growth in wages has been concentrated among top earners, while wages for the average worker have stagnated.
More people than ever are enrolling in college to try and secure their future, but the ballooning cost of higher education means that most students will take on a sizeable amount of debt. The median student loan debt now stands at $37,575, more than doubling since 2007.
Meanwhile, the cost of housing and healthcare has continued to outpace incomes. The average person would need to make $25.82 per-hour to afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment – more than 3x the federal minimum wage. There are only 28 counties in the entire United States where a worker earning the minimum wage could afford to rent a one-bedroom home. The average worker also pays $450 per month for healthcare coverage, a number that jumps to $1,168 for family plans.
