The term 'low food security' has been around for at least a decade. It's a classic example of the marginally schizophrenic depersonalization of language typical of bureaucrats.

BTW, you might want to research your figure on the number of hungry Americans. You threw out 35 million without a source - that's about 12% of the population. Assuming you mean a hunger for food and not some more abstract form of hunger, that seems like an extraordinarily inflated figure.

As for the 'civil war' in Iraq - it's a great example of how changing terminology doesn't change reality. The media can call it a civil war all it likes, but that doesn't change the fact that on the ground it's still mostly a combination of straight-out criminality and a foreign invasion through fifth-columnists.

Dave

Dave, the number is actually 38.2 million - the error is regretted. and yes, i'm a little shocked myself.

as for "foreign invasion through fifth columnists" - that's a double edged term.

according to your citation -

2004 food insecurity rate was 11.9%
2004 food insecurity with hunger rate was 3.9%

hunger and food insecurity are clearly two separate objects of study...so what was your point - ?

...something about semantics

unless you are an aspiring comedian it's a good idea to take a look at the terminology used in research before 'critiquing' it

Our media has been saying we are a democracy for so long that many people believe it.

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson

More fun with semantics:

Main Entry: fas·cism
Pronunciation: 'fa-"shi-z&m also 'fa-"si-
Function: noun
Etymology: Italian fascismo, from fascio bundle, fasces, group, from Latin fascis bundle & fasces fasces
1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

So in other words the people that oppose privatization of SS are fascists.

Too many people mistake words for reality, & think that if they change the words, it will change the reality; this is called 'magical thinking' & most of us learned about it in elementary psych class. Apparently, Dubya was absent from THAT particular group activity back then, too.

If anyone goes hungry in this country, I don't understand how. EBT cards, food stamps, WIC checks, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, church charities, friends, neighbors, and relatives...hell, put a "will work for food" sign up at your nearest intersection, and you're likely to make at least fifty dollars a day, which is more than enough to feed a family of four. And if all else fails, rob a bank. If you get away with it, you're rich! If you don't, you go to jail...where they feed you three times a day...

thanks for reading folks:

Troll - hunger and food insecurity are clearly two separate objects of study
Y'know, trolling is sort of an art and it actually requires some sort of actual argument. illiteracy and/or the inablity to comprehend documents doesnt qualify. Sorry.

Maurice - well, it sure resembles mob rule sometimes but i'd rather it than any of the alternatives available right now. Lol @ the fascist analogy though - I guess one man's socialism is another man's fascism.

Nancy - he was out clearing brush coz thats what manly men do.

RJ - well, i guess nobody told them they can't possibly go hungry in america.

We live in a Republic...

not a democracy!

I didn't read the article, because there were to many words in it, but i like the title. I agree totally. Americans are hungry, and we should fully take over Iraq so we can eat all of their food.

Dave, the number is actually 38.2 million - the error is regretted. and yes, i'm a little shocked myself.

Thanks for the link to the article, which also includes a link to the source report. The report actually differentiates actual hunger from the nebulous concept of 'food insecurity'. It also points out that hunger is defined in the broadest possible terms. The real figure for hunger found in the report is that based on that generous definition, only about 12 million people in America experience hunger at some time during the year. By objective standards such as those receiving public assistance for food the number is somewhat lower - maybe 10 million.

And this does NOT mean that these people are starving, just that they came up short on food for any of a number of reasons sometime during the year.

The food insecurity business is even weirder and I need to look into it more. It seems to have to do with families overspending on or stockpiling food, which could have absolutely nothing to do with poverty or hunger.

BTW, the first paragraph of the article you link to is deliberately misleading. Take a look at the two figures they refer to and see how that math works. The article also represents the figures as being for the last 5 years, without pointing out that the study referenced is 2 years out of date. As unemployment was peaking at the point of the study, we can assume that the level of hunger was high then too. As it is substantially down now, pending a more up to date study, it's reasonable to assume that hunger is correspondingly down.

Dave

Amrita writes, in #2:

Dave, the number is actually 38.2 million - the error is regretted. and yes, i'm a little shocked myself.

You should be shocked, because your own linked reference is entirely incorrect, as shown in their reference, the USDA study entitled Household Food Security in the United States, 2004.

THAT paper says, in part:

The prevalence of food insecurity rose from 11.2 percent of households in 2003 to 11.9 percent in 2004 and the prevalence of food insecurity with hunger rose from 3.5 percent to 3.9 percent.

Note the key word households. 12% of households, not Americans, suffered food insecurity (a stupid term) in 2004.

BIG difference!

"If anyone goes hungry in this country, I don't understand how."

You can't unless you're borderline mentally handicapped with an extreme case of laziness and ignorance. That's why we measure 'food insecurity' rather than hunger. Groups that depend on these social problems for their funding are always going to twist the definitions to make their problem look as bad as possible to justifying their continued existence and funding.

What I really don't like is when the pessimist political ideology then latches onto these scary numbers, like 35 million 'hungry', to push their big government agenda. Of course, they're not scientists so they're accidental misuse of the term 'hunger' in place of 'food insecure' is just an innocent laymen's mistake. Just ask them.

Further to my #12:

According to the US Census Bureau, there were 109.9 million households in the US in 2004, with an average of 2.6 persons per household.

12% of households ("food insecure") = 13,188,000
X 2.6 = 34,288.800 people

Of these, 3.9% of total households actually were hungry.

3.9% of households (hungry) = 4,286,000

X 2.6 =

11,143,860 persons actually went hungry in 2004.

Too many, but far fewer than 38M.

I'm of two minds about this issue, and here's why:

My boyfriend, though he worked like a dog all his life, suffered from schizophrenia, and breakdowns caused him to periodically quit his jobs, especially as his condition worsened. Before he got social security (he didn't know it existed until an outreach worker at the shelter he was staying at clued him in, he sometimes led a very rough life in city shelters.

When things were bad, he would literally walk miles to soup kitchens for a meal. Often he would find perfectly good food in garbage cans or discarded at the end of the day by restaurants. Many restaurants donate their day-old leftovers to these places as well. I have to admit if I were in his shoes I would gladly scrounge through the garbage rather than starve.

So having been through so much firsthand, when someone begs for change and says it's for food he is very skeptical because he knows that there are soup kitchens and food pantries throughout the city.

Another incident that gave me pause--a young woman with a baby tried to convince me to run her food stamp card through when I made my purchases at the grocery store recently. It took me awhile to figure out that what she wanted to do was give me the card to pay for my food, and then give I'd her the cash I would have used to buy it and hand it to her.

In the old days, when food stamps were actually stamps, abuse was rampant--people would sell their stamps at a discount. One person I know did this all the time for booze money.

On the other hand, I did see a feature on the local news about this very topic, and saw a shot of a long line of people standing in line at a food pantry. It was noted that the largest number of hungry are children and the elderly. These are the saddest victims of the situation. If a mother can sell her food money for cash, her baby will doubtless suffer. Some poor elderly people live on a very small pension, and it can literally be a choice between electricity and food for them. In fact, during this summer's heat wave some elderly did die because they didn't have the money to turn on the a/c--some didn't even turn on a fan.

I know there are many honest working poor families that do need food stamps, and I also know that you don't necessarily get enough to get by easily. But frugality can go a very long way. So as I say, I'm quite conflicted on this issue.

Last I heard global agriculture produced about about 2800 calories per person per day. I heard this on the radio, I can't cite the source, but if your really interested, do the searches to counter the number.
I'll just use 2800, or enough food to provide 5-6 healthy meals each day to every man, woman, and child on the planet.
In all the squabling, we've established a low end figure of 11 million not getting three meals a day every day in the richest country in the world.
I don't have a good a solution, I'm more than willing to admit government centralization isn't the answer, but-
Clearly something is wrong here.

And on the other part of the post-

The really ironic thing about the administration and the press getting in this semantic war is the sides they've chosen.
If the press wants to imply the invasion has trapped us in a quagmire, the last thing they should call it is a civil war.
If this was a neat&easy two or three party civil war where each clearly defined side was itching to fight the other openly in conventional battles with governance of the whole country as the prize-
there'd be a solution in sight. It wouldn't be what everyone wants, but at least there would be a path to the end of this.

If the the Prez wants to win the battle of semantics he should be doing all he can to characterize this as precisely that kind of civil war.
Instead his own staff describes a chaotic situation with no clear sides or goals, just plenty of greed, hate, fear, and a seemingly never ending supply of guns and bombs. The result being anarchy that can't be solved by military OR political means.
Since he put us there, the last thing his guys should be describing is a country wracked by unended violence we're unable to leave. Since what they've just described would be, you know, a bit of a quagmire.

SS, I don't get 3 square meals a day. I'm lucky if I get two. I'm working too hard to take time for 3 meals on many days. Does that make me part of the 11 million or so who are hungry? I know I sometimes go to bed hungry because it's too late to eat anything. Hmmm. I wonder if the 11 million includes all the teenage girls who refuse to eat?

Dave

Clavos, I hate to nitpick, because there are so many other thinks to pick, but your 3.9% * 2.6 people doesn't quite work. You're assuming that the average household experiencing hunger has 2.6 members. According to the link, there's a higher-than-average rate of hunger among single people. That might, or might not, mean that the average hungry household has fewer than 2.6 people.

To make things more complicated, the percentage of households experiencing hunger in the last year is 3.9, but it's 3.0% in the prior thirty days. So your estimate is likely 33% high at any given moment. And I notice that some people claim hunger in the prior 30 days but not in the prior 365 days, which raises some serious questions about the survey.

Also, not all members of the family experienced equal hunger.Family got counted if one member reported food issues. On a positive note, it seems like kids got fed first. Report showed that only .1% or so are hungry at a given time.

Baronius, Red;

All true, good points.

In keeping with the KISS principle I just took the most basic data to come up with a more realistic figure than the one originally published in the article.

Thanks, guys.

RE my #21:

In keeping with the KISS principle I just took the most basic data to come up with a more realistic figure than the one originally published in the article.

Should have been:

In keeping with the KISS principle I just took the most basic data to come up with a more realistic figure than the one originally published in the comments.

"Hmmm. I wonder if the 11 million includes all the teenage girls who refuse to eat?"

Yeah, are people on diets included in this figure? Seriously, I don't know how else so many millions of Americans could possibly be "going hungry" ...

The USDA/Census definition is "Food Insecure."

That sounds like typical government gibberish, so we can only guess as to what those finely honed bureaucratic minds mean by that, but my guess is that teenage girls and dieters are not included.

Does anyone have an actual, official definition for what the hell 'food insecure' means?

Dave

From Medicinenet.com:

Definition of Food-insecure

Food-insecure: Referring to the situation when people need to live with hunger and fear starvation.

And here's one for Dave:

From the Austin Food Bank:

Food Insecurity: According to the Texas Alliance for Human Needs, food insecurity is defined as the lack of access to enough food to fully meet basic needs at all times due to lack of financial resources.

That one sems to make sense...

Well, the first definition could just describe a psychological condition - I've actually seen it in refugees and some people who lived through the depression. They horde food and act as if they're at risk of starvation even when no such risk actually exists.

The second definition seems more relevant. Under that definition, when I was a college student and ran out of money close to the end of the month and had to skip a couple of meals or eat ramen I guess I was suffering from food insecurity. But I sure wasn't starving and didn't think of myself as part of a great mass of The Hungry.

Dave

I mostly ate PB & J sandwiches while in college. I guess I was food insecure. Too bad I didn't know it at the time, I might have applied for food stamps.

Or not...

I think I was actually most 'food insecure' when I was doing graduate study in the UK. For about a month when my grant money ran out I lived on spam on crackers. Now that makes Ramen look good.

Dave

Hey, Ramen is great stuff!

re: food insecurity
if you read the Time magazine article linked to above in the post (helpfully titled, "What it means to go Hungry") then i believe a number of questions will be answered such as what does "food insecurity" mean. eg:

The dehydrated phrase "food insecurity," in fact, has been the accepted language of aid workers and the U.N. and government studies for years. Until now, Americans who had to scramble to put food on the table but somehow always managed, with the help maybe of a food bank or soup kitchen, were said to experience "food insecurity without hunger." There are 12.6 million such households; about 4.4 million families actually had to reduce or skip meals altogether because they ran out of money to buy food. They used to be called "food insecure with hunger." Now they are described as experiencing "very low food security."

the study in effect uses the term as a sliding scale.

secondly, there seems to be a lot of confusion as to whether hungry means starving and if so how many people and the impossibility of such an occurrence. again, the Time article addresses these questions.

here're a couple more places to find information from, some of which actually work with the hungry:
Second Harvest 2006
breitbart.com
And from March 2006

While I dont really understand why hungry people are suddenly a left/right issue on this board, the basic point is whether you're going hungry once a month or three times a month or the entire month, does eliminating the word "hunger" actually accomplish anything positive? The people who actually work against hunger in America come from all sides of the political spectrum whether its church groups and farmers and hunters or people who advocate more federal food aid. in fact religious groups work more on behalf of the hungry than any other.

a couple of people seem to question the validity of the study that said 38 million. Well, it was carried out by the govt as it has been for the past 10 years - and i have yet to hear of any sort of governmental organization that actually tries to make itself look worse than usual. the Second Harvest one is from 2006 and their website has detailed information as to who they are, what was their methodology, etc.

so are the people lying? if 4, 10, 15, 30, 40 (or however many you compute on your own because you obviously know better) MILLION people are lying about how much they get to eat then the problem is worse than hunger and we all need to be very very afraid because we're all living amongst a significant population of psychos and/or criminals.

"we all need to be very very afraid because we're all living amongst a significant population of psychos and/or criminals."

Well, I already knew that...

oh and Maurice - we live in a democratic republic. a pure democracy as practised by the city states of greece is a form of government that is ideally suited to a small state. otherwise it really would be mob rule. btw, those city states didnt always guarantee equal representation.

semantics is a pretty powerful tool isnt it?

Amrita, the reason that the number who are hungry becomes a political issue is that there's an ongoing concern among people who you would probably classify as 'right' - though I'm not sure correctly - that there's a concerted effort by those who I'd classify as being on the 'left' to redefine reality and to do so in a negative way. Their political fortunes and the budgets of the institutions they support depend on human suffering being as widespread as possible. They feed on misery. They have to tell people that the nation is going to hell in a handbasket to scare them into supporting them and spending money on their causes. Whether it's true or not is largely irrlevant. That's why those of us who have a more realistic or perhaps just more positive outlook on the world are concerned.

Dave

Well said, Dave. I think number pumping goes on in any group that receives funding.

Amirita with all due respect I believe we live in a Representative Republic

a couple of people seem to question the validity of the study that said 38 million.

Actually, Amrita, I didn't question the validity of the study at all.

I questioned and proved, in comments #s 12 and 14, that your interpretation of the data presented in the USDA study was erroneous.