When we envision hunger in the world, it is not usually our own communities that we picture. Yet reports from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) tell a different story. Hunger not only exists in the U.S., it is common. Yet the United States is one of the largest agricultural exporters.
One helpful concept to understand hunger in the U.S. is food insecurity. Unlike hunger, food insecurity measures the difficulty a household has accessing food. Rather than focusing on how much food is consumed or the nutritional value of the food consumed, food insecurity is concerned with the ability of a household to access food reliably. Food insecurity points to two separate but related barriers to adequate food, the economic and the social.
Economic inaccessibility of food is clear and what is usually envisioned when thinking about hunger. If a household does not have enough income to purchase enough food then they suffer from food insecurity due to economic causes.
An example of a social cause of food insecurity is a family who find themselves living in a food desert. Food deserts are areas where nutritious food is not readily available for sale. This could be in an urban center where there are areas that do not have grocery stores and so most food must be purchased at restaurants or corner stores. These are both more expensive and often less nutritious than the fruits and vegetables that can be purchased in grocery stores. This means that a household that earns sufficient wages to purchase nutritious food might end up spending more money for less nutritious food and so still not receive adequate, nutritious food.
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