How Hungry Are We?

If you are reading this, you  might be hungry.

Please read the following, from Adam MacGregor of Just Harvest, and find out how you can help yourself or others who find themselves unable to feed their families right now by visiting the Just Harvest Website. The US is a mess and we need to help one another and ensure that those we elect understand the needs of their communities.

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Nearly One in Four of Allegheny County’s Households with Children Report Inability to Afford Enough Food

Newly released report shows that region’s rate of hunger follows national trend

Across the four congressional districts in Allegheny County, nearly 25 percent of families with children have reported that they have not been able to afford needed food over the past year, according to a report released yesterday by the Washington D.C.-based Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

 

The report, titled Food Hardship in America, separately examines food hardship rates – the inability to afford enough food – for households with children and without children nationally and in every state, every Congressional District and 100 of the country’s largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas.  The full report is available at the following link: http://frac.org/pdf/aug2011_food_hardship_report_children.pdf

 

The analysis shows that food hardship rates are very high both for households with children and for households without children. Nationally over 2009 – 2010, the food hardship rate for households without children was 14.9 percent, and it was 23.4 percent for families with children.

 

Allegheny County comprises Congressional districts 4, 12, 14 and 18. The average rate of food hardship among households with children the districts is 21 percent, ranging from 17.5 percent in District 18 (Tim Murphy) to 25.4 percent in District 14 (Michael Doyle), which includes the city of Pittsburgh.

 

Tara Marks, Co-Director of Just Harvest (a Southside-based nonprofit that has been working since 1986 to eliminate hunger and poverty in our region) noted that the FRAC report’s findings illustrates the disproportionate, devastating effect that the recession has had upon low-income families.  And, it serves to underscore the gravity of the task facing the newly formed Debt-Reduction Super-committee, of which Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey is a member.

 

“As advocates for poor people in our region, we hope that Senator Toomey will take these numbers into consideration in the inevitable discussion over whether to cut funding to essential public safety-net programs like SNAP [the Supplemental nutritional assistance program, formerly known as ‘food stamps’] or TANF [temporary assistance to needy families],” said Marks.  “Programs that protect the poorest and most vulnerable Americans must remain off the bargaining table in these debt-reduction proceedings.”

 

Yesterday’s report is part of FRAC’s ongoing Food Hardship in America series, which analyzes data that were collected by Gallup and provided to FRAC.  The data were gathered as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index project, which has interviewed more than one million households since January 2008.  FRAC has analyzed responses to the question: “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?” 

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Simply Put- How hungry are we?

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