More families going without enough food

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

Taken together, the findings provide the latest glimpse into the toll that the weak economy has taken on the well-being of the nation's residents. The findings are from a snapshot of food in America that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued every year since 1995, based on Census Bureau surveys.

It documents both Americans who are scrounging for adequate food — people living with some amount of "food insecurity" in the lexicon of experts — and those whose food shortages are so severe that they are hungry.

More families are going hungry in Washington state, too.

Linda Stone, senior food-policy coordinator with the Children's Alliance, a social-services nonprofit, said hunger in the state is up 24 percent.

"We weren't surprised," said Stone, citing the recession's toll on Washington families.

In Washington, the number of people who struggle regularly to put enough food on the table has increased from 90,000 to 112,000, according to the survey. The data was gathered last December.

Nationally, more people in 2008 lacked the ability to put food on the table than in any year since the federal government began monitoring food insecurity in 1995.

Being food insecure means not having enough money to buy food through the month, or having to eat less or poorer quality food to make ends meet. A greater number of people in Washington, about 228,000, are also food insecure, a 13 percent increase over the prior year.

"We need more family-wage jobs, and federal nutrition programs should be stronger," Stone said. She also hopes the state Legislature will act to help pay for summer meal programs for children who depend on breakfast and lunch programs in public schools during the school year.

"There are children in classrooms across the state who may be coming into classrooms without dinner," Stone said. "We see school feeding programs as rock- bottom important."

The report released Monday is the first produced during the tenure of President Obama, who pledged during his campaign for the White House last year to eliminate hunger among children by 2015, a goal that no previous president has set.

The administration has not produced a full-fledged plan to meet that objective, but White House and Agriculture officials said in recent interviews that they are developing policies.

Among the first is a decision to use $85 million freed up by Congress as part of a recent appropriations bill to experiment with ways to get food to more children during the summer, when subsidized school breakfasts and lunches are unavailable.

Slightly more than half the people surveyed who reported they had food shortages said that they had, in the previous month, participated in one of the government's main anti-hunger and nutrition programs: food stamps, subsidized school lunches or WIC, the nutrition program for women with babies or young children.

Last year, people in 4.8 million households used private food pantries, compared to 3.9 million in 2007, while people in about 625,000 households resorted to soup kitchens, nearly 90,000 more than the year before.

Food shortages, the report shows, are particularly pronounced among women raising children alone. Last year, more than one in three single mothers reported that they struggled for food and more than one in seven said someone in their home had been hungry — far eclipsing the food problem in any other kind of household.

The report also found that people who are black or Hispanic were more than twice as likely as whites to report that food in their home was scarce.

Poverty and food shortages are linked but not the same thing, according to the report. Just half the households in which food is scarce have incomes at or below the official poverty level, the data show, while most of the rest have slightly less than twice the poverty level.

People who do not consistently have enough food experience the problem repeatedly, but not all the time, the report states. On average, households with such scarcity had the problem seven months out of the year, while about one-fourth said the problem occurred almost every month.

Seattle Times staff reporter Lynda V. Mapes contributed to this report