Food Insecurity and Hunger

Food security is access by all people in a population at all times to a reliable supply of food from socially acceptable sources sufficient for an active and healthy life. In contrast, food insecurity is the involuntary shortage of food due to economic constraints. When this food shortage progresses to the point that physical symptoms are felt, hunger occurs. Since the 1990s, these terms have largely come to replace a focus on malnutrition, a physiological condition that can arise from both shortages of food and disease processes. Worldwide, population levels of food insecurity tend to be associated with gross domestic product; within the United States, ethnic minorities and families with children have higher levels of food insecurity.

Hunger and food insecurity were rediscovered in the United States during the 1960s as physicians supported by the Field Foundation visited poor populations and reported widespread nutritional problems previously assumed to exist only in developing countries. These problems became the targets of Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Federal resources were directed to programs to assist low-income families with job training, nutrition, and health care needs. These programs highlighted social inequality, particularly that linked to racial discrimination. Due to the activities of such programs as the Food Stamp Program, Head Start, and the Women, Infants, and Children feeding program, the prevalence of frank malnutrition was reduced, but it was replaced with food insufficiency that is chronic or cyclic in many poor households.

In the 1980s in developing countries, the discussion of food insufficiency was redefined. Experts noted that “famine” and “malnutrition” were not the same as food insufficiency, but rather, a complex range of factors kept households from having access to sufficient food. The change in focus to factors regulating access has been instrumental in producing national and international efforts to increase access.

In 1996, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations convened the World Food Summit. This summit affirmed poverty as the major source of food insecurity and its eradication as a critical step in reducing food insecurity. Participants set a goal of reducing food insecurity by one half by 2015 and acknowledged three core concepts—food availability, food access, and food utilization—each a necessary but not sufficient condition for the next. Cross-cutting these concepts is a set of risks (e.g., conflict, climatic fluctuations, job loss, and epidemic disease) that can disrupt any of the three cores. A second summit in 2002, called to assess the reasons for poor progress toward the 2015 goal, cited a lack of will by the signing countries. However, critics cited the need for “food sovereignty,” the rights of poor countries to grow food for their own countries' consumption, rather than for export through multinational corporations. These proceedings highlight the web of factors that regulate availability, access, and utilization of foods: land ownership and control, access to credit for agricultural inputs, and national policies regarding food exports.

At the same time as efforts focused on economic development as a means of ensuring food access, private efforts in the United States focused on food banking, soup kitchens, and other means of providing emergency food to the poor. The number of such programs has increased dramatically since demand spiked with the recession of the 1980s. Food banks were established to receive surplus food supplies, gleaned produce, and food donated through local and national food drives. The food banks supply a wide network of public and private food pantries and soup kitchens, staffed by volunteer organizations that distribute food directly to those in need. Analysts point out that such programs have allowed contributors to believe they are helping to solve the problem of hunger, while not directly addressing the complex circumstances (e.g., low-wage employment, mental illness and drug addiction, social stratification, declining government support for social programs) that lead to household food insufficiency.

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