Food insecurity and hunger: a defining moment

Much of the discrepancy over the magnitude of the hunger problem in the United States stems from differences in its definition. Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that "hunger" occupies an awkward place in our lexicon. Hunger can be used to evoke the powerful and moving images of deprivation furnished by television footage of famine conditions in Rwanda, Somalia, and Ethiopia. At the other extreme, it can roll off our tongues on a daily basis without even a thought, as in "I'm hungry; let's go eat."

The hunger of the severely malnourished is easily identified; for famine situations, the definition itself is a minor issue in addressing the problem. Although the wasting and stunting characteristic of severe malnutrition are mostly absent in this country, for many people, the "let's go eat" solution to the sensation of hunger often does not exist.

The President's Task Force on Food Assistance, convened in 1983 to study whether hunger was increasing, recognized that there were both medical and commonly used definitions of hunger. A medical definition relates to measures of longstanding malnutrition, such as wasting, stunting, or anemia.

But a definition that requires clinical signs measures hunger only after it has existed for an extended period of time - long after it may have affected the functioning of young children at school, for example. The Task Force also offered commonly used definitions of hunger, as "a situation in which someone cannot obtain an adequate amount of food, even if the experience of being unsatisfied, of not getting enough to eat."

Since then, various researchers broadened the focus to include aspects of the poverty-related hunger experience beyond the physiological sensation of hunger itself and tested questionnaires to measure its existence. The Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) defined hunger as "the mental and physical condition that comes from not eating enough food due to insufficient economic, family, or community resources." The FRAC survey asked respondents whether they or their children skipped meals, reduced portion sizes, or ate less than they thought they should because there was not enough money to buy food. The survey also asked whether respondents relied on a limited number of foods to feed their children or whether any of their children went to bed hungry because there was not enough money for food.

Cornell University researchers developed a broader definition, based on results from open-ended interviews with low-income women in upstate New York, as "the inability to acquire or consume an adequate quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so." The Cornell work reflects the shift of emphasis from medically-based to socially-based definitions of hunger by including anxiety about the household food supply and acquisition of food in socially unacceptable ways, such as begging, scavenging, or stealing.

But hunger and worrying about being hungry are clearly not the same thing. In order to preserve the basic interpretation of hunger as not getting enough to eat, and yet incorporate the related problems of food procurement and management under poverty conditions, the term "food security" has found increasing usage. Previously, the term had been used in the development economics literature to describe the stability of countrywide food stocks over time.

The American Institute of Nutrition defines food security as:

...access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life and includes at a minimum: (a) the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, and (b) the assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways...

Food insecurity exists whenever these conditions are limited or uncertain. Hunger and malnutrition are potential, although not necessary, consequences of food insecurity.

Consensus has grown on using this definition of food security as it relates to hunger, which represents a severe level of food insecurity. Less severe food insecurity can be seen as an early-warning signal: a sign of problems indicating a higher risk of hunger in the future. Along with this clarification has come a better understanding of the kind of hunger that represents a public-health and public-policy concern - households caught in circumstances in which at least some members simply do not get enough to eat as a result of insufficient resources. A measure of hunger as defined by insufficient resources is a key element of the new national survey.

COPYRIGHT 1995 U.S. Department of Agriculture
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group