• About the Study
• Methodology
• Key Findings
• Who We Serve
  • Demographics
  • Food Insecurity
    • Household Food Insecurity
    • Food Stamp Program
    • Indicators
    • Food Assistance
  • Health
  • Services
• How We Serve
• Local Picture
• Snapshot Comparisons
• Media Center

Food Insecurity and Hunger

Food insecurity is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that varies along a continuum of successive stages as it becomes more severe.  A scaling tool developed by the USDA provides an important approach being used increasingly to assess food security and hunger among households.  Six questions in a six-item short module, the minimal information required to construct the scale, were included in the client survey.1   Food security and food insecurity are conceptually defined as the following 2 :

• Food security:  “Access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.  Food security includes at a minimum:  (1) the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, and (2) an assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways (e.g., without resorting to emergency food supplies, scavenging, stealing, or other coping strategies).”
• Food insecurity:  “Limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.”

The approach to examining food security which we will use in this chapter involves an approximation of this conceptual framework.  Indeed, in the current study population, all of the respondents are reliant to at least some degree on “emergency food supplies” as specified in the first bullet above, simply by the way the sample was assembled (i.e., at emergency food providers).  However, despite the conceptual underpinnings summarized above, the actual questions which are customarily used to measure food security (Bickel et al. 2000) do not directly ask about the use of emergency food.  In this study we will essentially examine how the sample members who were interviewed responded to a set of questions which are designed to approximate operationally the definition of food insecurity.  Use of this measure will allow us to examine a measure of need for our study population which is directly comparable to that used in mnay other studies.

This chapter begins by assessing A2H clients’ levels of food security, first for all households and then separately for households with children and for households with elderly members.  Subsequent sections then provide data on household responses to the specific questions used in constructing the food security scores. 

1 Bickel, Gary, Mark Nord, Cristofer Price, William Hamilton, and John Cook.  “Guide to Measuring Household Food Security, Revised 2000.”  U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, March 2000.

2 “Core Indicators of Nutritional State for Difficult-to-Sample Populations.”  Journal of Nutrition, vol. 120, no.11S, November 1990.