Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI articulated the demands placed upon us by our obligation to the vulnerable in our midst: “Jesus taught his disciples to pray by asking the Heavenly Father not for “my” but for “our” daily bread. Thus, he desired every person to feel co‐responsible for his brothers so that no one would want for what he needs in order to live.” (2006). In 2018, 37.2 million individuals, including 11.2 million children, lived in food-insecure households, meaning there was not sufficient food for all household members (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2019).
Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has taught us the importance of subsidiarity in thinking about how best to serve the most vulnerable among us, namely, that assistance is sometimes best provided by more decentralized sources including, say, cities, neighborhoods, and families. And, so it goes with addressing food insecurity. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) is an important first line of defense against hunger, and there is extensive evidence that SNAP improves food security (Gundersen, 2019). Yet, millions of SNAP recipients are still food insecure and millions more food-insecure persons are ineligible for SNAP. Thus, other solutions are needed.
To effectively address food insecurity, it is important to understand the geography of food insecurity in local communities. However, details about the levels of need were, in general, not available until 2010, when Feeding America, the nationwide network of food banks, established the Map the Meal Gap (MMG) study which estimates county- and congressional district-level food insecurity for both the full population and children (https://map.feedingamerica.org/).
Execution of the 2020 release of the study (based on data from 2018) was underway when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. This pandemic will lead to increases in food insecurity that will not be evenly distributed by geography. In addition to estimating historical food insecurity rates, MMG can be used to project how food insecurity may increase because of the COVID-19 economic crisis, as follows. (For a description of how the base MMG is calculated, see Gundersen et al., 2017.) We first consider what will happen if two of the variables in the MMG model, annual unemployment and poverty, increase in 2020 along the lines predicted by expert opinions. (The other variables in the model are unlikely to change in the short term due to COVID-19.) In our most recent estimates of this (Hake et al., 2020), we have assumed that the annual average unemployment rate will increase 7.6 percentage points and the poverty rate will increase by 4.8 percentage points. To localize the projected change in the national annual unemployment rate, we combined an analysis of jobs likely to be lost by sector and occupation (based on https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Goldman-US-Economics-Analyst-3-31.pdf) with actual percentages of workers by industry from the American Community Survey (ACS).
In total, we project that in 2020 there will be 17 million more food-insecure persons in the U.S. compared to 2018, for a total of 54 million. At the state-level, in many cases, the ordering of states would be the same whether COVID-19 occurred or did not occur. For example, the states with the five highest rates before COVID-19 – Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and New Mexico – are projected to have the highest rates in the wake of COVID-19. But some states will see relatively higher rates, including Nevada, which was 20th pre-COVID-19, but projected to be 8th in the wake of COVID-19. Within states, there can be enormous differences in projected food insecurity. Consider Alabama, the state with the third highest food insecurity rate, where the projected rates range from 15.6% in Shelby County to 31.7% in Perry County. In North Dakota, which has a relatively low overall rate, the projected range is from 8.7% in Sargent County to 22.9% in Sioux County.
Across the country the range of projected county-level food insecurity goes from 8.6% in Loudoun County, Virginia, to 34.2% in Jefferson County, Mississippi. The variation in food insecurity rates can be attributed to various factors, one of which is race. Structural disparities have led to substantially higher levels of food insecurity for some minority groups, including African Americans, and American Indians, and some Asian households. For example, in 2018, compared to non-Hispanic Whites, African Americans were two and a half times as likely to live in a food-insecure household (Coleman-Jensen, 2019). Among the ten counties with the highest projected food insecurity rates, eight have a large proportion of African American residents (60% or greater) and two are majority- American Indian (90% or greater).
The results from these projections of food insecurity rates by county can provide important insights for food banks and their agencies operating at the local level. In doing so, our hope is that we will move closer to meeting Pope Emeritus Benedict’s call to feel responsible for those most vulnerable in our midst.
Craig Gundersen, University of Illinois
Monica Hake, Feeding America
Emily Engelhard, Feeding America
Adam Dewey, Feeding America
Further Readings
Benedict XVI. ANGELUS. Saint Peter’s Square. Sunday, 12 November. 2006
Coleman-Jensen A, Rabbitt M, Gregory C, Singh A. Household Food Security in the United States in 2018. ERR-270. Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. 2019.
Gundersen C. Catholic social teaching and the right to food in the U.S.: The role of SNAP. On the Margins: A Newsletter of the Catholic Research Economists Discussion Organization 2019;5(1).
Gundersen C, Dewey A, Hake M, Engelhard E, Crumbaugh A. Food insecurity across the rural/urban divide: Are counties in need being reached by charitable food assistance? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2017;672(1):217-236.
Hake M, Engelhard E, Dewey A, Gundersen C. .The Impact of the Coronavirus on Food Insecurity [Brief series]. Available from Feeding America: https://www.feedingamerica.org/research/coronavirus-hunger-research. 2020
