"I hate it that 1 in 5 children go hungry at night"

Barrak Obama.com:

Eliminate Child Hunger by 2015: According to the Department of Agriculture, in 2006, 430,000 children in the United States experienced hunger. Further, 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 6 children lives in a household that is food insecure -- an Unacceptable situation.

According to the US Census Bureau July 2006 estimate there were 73,735,562 people in the US under 18. That works out to 1 in child in 172 children experienced hunger.

Is America Struggling with Hunger?

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Jeremie T.A. Rostan agrege de philosophie, teaches philosophy and economics in San Francisco, California.

"One in eight Americans is struggling with hunger."

If you haven't heard that line, then you must not have a TV. And if you haven't read it, even if you can't be bothered to open a newspaper, then you must live in some very, very, remote part of the country.

"One in eight Americans is struggling with hunger." Everybody knows that. And everybody is talking about it. That statistic caught on like wildfire, striking everyone with a feeling of collective emergency.

My reaction was quite different; not because I don't care about the satisfaction of my neighbors' primary needs, but only because I am more suspicious than sensitive.

One in eight, I thought, that's 12.5 percent a huge proportion. That's thirty-seven million, five hundred thousand people, a huge number incredible, really. I said to myself, how can it be that so many Americans struggle with hunger, and yet I see so little of it?

So I did what few people do: I checked. Where does that "one in eight" come from? And what does it mean?

The now-famous statistic comes from the annual Food Security Survey (FSS) of the United States Department of Agriculture. The first thing to point out is that this level of hunger is not new: contrary to what one may infer from the current campaign, the recent economic crisis has little to do with it. In fact, while food insecurity in America has increased slightly under recent economic conditions, it has been more or less stable for the last 15 years, affecting around 11 percent of households.

Another interesting tidbit of information is that until 2005, the FSS divided food insecurity into "food insecurity without hunger" and "food insecurity with hunger." It then replaced those labels, without any change in their statistical definition, with "low food security" and "very low food security," respectively. Thus, the famous "one-in-eight" hungry Americans include all Americans living in households that, until 2005, were described as food insecure, but without hunger.

So, just how many Americans do face hunger? Well, households with "very low food security" have represented a consistent third of all food-insecure households in past years around 4 percent of total households...... More Here