Here you’ll meet hungry farmhands and retired schoolteachers, hungry families who are in the U.S. Here dinners are cooked using macaroni-and-cheese mixes and other processed ingredients from food pantries, and fresh fruits and vegetables are eaten only in the first days after the SNAP payment arrives. To witness hunger in America today is to enter a twilight zone where refrigerators are so frequently bare of all but mustard and ketchup that it provokes no remark, inspires no embarrassment. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20.

One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. In 1980 there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country today there are 50,000. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012-a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult-typically in a full-time job.

“Today more working people and their families are hungry because wages have declined.” “This is not your grandmother’s hunger,” says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at the City University of New York. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “It’s Not Enough” Christina Dreier describes the difficulty of feeding her family on an inadequate budget.Ĭhances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. “We have to eat, you know,” she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. Running the errand would mean forgoing overtime pay that could go for groceries. It’s peak harvest time, and he often works until eight at night, applying pesticides on commercial farms for $14 an hour. But that will happen only if Jim finishes work early. She and Jim need to open a new bank account so they can make automatic payments instead of scrambling to pay in cash. On this particular afternoon Dreier is worried about the family van, which is on the brink of repossession. Congressional cuts to SNAP last fall of five billion dollars pared her benefits from $205 to $172 a month. She and her husband, Jim, pit one bill against the next-the phone against the rent against the heat against the gas-trying always to set aside money to make up for what they can’t get from the food pantry or with their food stamps, issued by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The fear of being unable to feed her children hangs over Dreier’s days. “I eat lunch if there’s enough,” she says. She’s gone through most of the food she got last week from a local food pantry her own lunch will be the bits of potato left on the kids’ plates. She shakes the last seven chicken nuggets onto a battered baking sheet, adds the remnants of a bag of Tater Tots and a couple of hot dogs from the fridge, and slides it all into the oven. Keagan ignores the school breakfast on offer and is so hungry by lunchtime that Dreier picks through the dregs of her freezer in hopes of filling him and his little sister up. Dreier knows her gambit might backfire, and it does.

A tale in the desert classes