Food Insecurity In The United States

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I want you to picture a mother and her children, in their house, kept awake at night from pain of hunger. In nearby town, another family isn't sure what and when their next meal will be because they ran out of money for the month. Somewhere else, a child has trouble concentrating at problems in school because there wasn't anything to eat for breakfast in his house. If I were to ask you where in the world this was taking place, the first guess would almost never be the U.S. and that's the problem. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, food insecurity is a "household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food." This ranges from people who just don't have the income to eat quality meals, to the families who are forced to completely skip meals altogether. Right now, around 42 million people, or 13% of the population, in the United States are defined as being food insecure. …show more content…
Among the individuals that directly suffer from food insecurity there is an increased chance of many illnesses. Counter-intuitively, a 2014 Hunger in America survey found that about half of food insecure households have a family member with high blood pressure, and about a third have member with diabetes. The leading explanation is that in the United States, families who cannot afford nutritious food are driven to eat less expensive unhealthy food. A combination of a less than nutritious diet and added stress from a lack of money, results in chronic illnesses which consequently decreases the amount of money a family has to spend on food. Even more troubling however, are the effects that food insecurity has on children of these