Where Are The One-in-Five Kids Who Are Going Hungry? - Granite Grok

Where Are The One-in-Five Kids Who Are Going Hungry?

In the [Food Network’s] holiday promotion their spokespeople cite the much-debunked statistic that one in five children in America goes hungry on a regular basis.  .

Something is truly out of whack here.  If one in five American children are going hungry how can there also be an epidemic of obesity that requires the downsizing the heavily subsidized public school lunch program to help correct?   Basic observation indicates the children of the affluent are neither overweight nor emaciated.  If anything, many middle class children tend to look a little pudgy, while a great many of the children of the welfare class and the working poor are noticeably obese.  So who and where are those twenty percent of American children who go hungry?

For more details from Smith on the breakdown of the hungry-kids deception, keep reading.

Rosslyn Smith -American Thinker

Three years ago economist Paul Roderick Gregory addressed these inflated claims about hunger.  He found the one in five number was likely to be a misuse of data from the annual survey of the USDA that classifies households as “food secure,” “food insecure,” and “very low food secure.”  According to the USDA a household is  “food insecure” if they report a combination of three behaviors: worrying about not having money to buy food, substituting cheaper foods, or if financial concerns cause them to occasionally skip a meal or to eat smaller meals.  Note the term hungry is not used in this survey nor does it directly attempt to measure hunger. The survey measures the anxiety people have about being hungry. 

Gregory concluded

Slightly over 21 percent of households are “food insecure.” This is the one-in-five statistic we hear from the media and advocacy groups.

The one-in-five figure is for all households, many of which consist only of adults. If we limit the sample to households with children, ten percent of them are classified as food insecure. If any group wishes to use the broadest possible measure of children’s “struggle for food,” the ten percent figure would be it.

Notably, weekly spending on food by the median “food insecure” household is 95 percent of the cost of the USDA Thrifty Food Plan — the minimum cost of an affordable and healthy diet. It seems that another five cents on the dollar separates 16.2 million hungry children from a healthy diet.

Not publicized by the childhood hunger lobby are the USDA’s most direct measures of childhood hunger. They reveal that between one and two percent of families “cut the size of children’s meals” or report that “children were hungry” or “skipped meals.” And only one tenth of one percent of families reported that “children did not eat for a whole day.” These findings do not suggest, to say the least, an epidemic of childhood hunger. The USDA’s most direct measures yield a childhood hunger rate between one and two in a hundred, not one in five.

A wealthy nation like the United States should have no hungry children. The USDA figures show that we are close to this ideal. That “food insecure” families spend almost enough to buy the government’s suggested minimum balanced diet tells us that the problem is poor food choice, not hunger per se.

Long story short, it’s a lie.
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