RC Blog

Hunger in Washington up 24 percent

posted by Cydney Gillis on Monday, November 16 at 3:00pm

The U.S. Department of Agriculture delivered a grim report today: 49.1 million Americans faced food insecurity at the end of 2008, a 35 percent increase from December 2007 and the highest jump since the department started tracking the data in 1995.

Food insecurity means that, on any given day, a household’s members may not have enough to eat—something that has driven more and more families to food banks and meal providers as the economic downturn has worsened.

In Washington state, the number of food-insecure households increased to 288,000 in 2008, an increase of 13 percent. The rise in households experiencing hunger—a more dire category of food insecurity—jumped to 112,000, or 24 percent. According to the Children’s Alliance of Seattle, that means as many as 373,000 children in the state live in households where food is in shortage.

“These numbers are even worse than we anticipated,” Linda Stone, the Children’s Alliance senior food policy coordinator, said in a statement. “Families will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure their children get something to eat, but this report shows that more and more families can’t put food on the table no matter how hard they try.”

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