What is food insecurity?
U.S. Department of Agriculture: Food Insecurity is defined as the lack of consistent, dependable access to adequate food for active, healthy living. According to USDA data: 41.2 million U.S. residents, including 12.9 million children, experienced food insecurity in 2016. Between 2014 and 2016, USDA data showed the prevalence of food insecurity ranging from 8.7% in Hawaii to 18.7% in Mississippi, with the national average being 13%.
Why is Food Security Hard to Fix?
The American Journal of Nursing writes that food security is based on the following factors: availability, access, utilization, and stability. It is hard to fix, because it is a multi-faceted problem that highlights deeply ingrained attitudes and habits.
Availability
In order for our communities to thrive, they require good, quality food sources. Facts show that certain neighborhoods are more likely to be food wastelands: communities of color, areas where the poor, non-citizens, and elderly congregate, etc.
What I mean by food wasteland is that these areas do not have quality grocery stores featuring natural and healthy foods. What these areas do have are plenty of fast food joints, and small pit-stop stores (mainly selling booze and highly processed snacks). These type of convenience stores do not support healthy eating. So these communities, already in dire straits, are now getting poor nutritional support leading to all sorts of medical conditions. These communities may also have large numbers of people with diabetes, obesity, and malnutrition.
Good, natural, healthy food options need to be available to, and located in, every community.
Access
Food needs to be affordable and in close proximity. Even when trying to organize and build good food businesses in needy communities, the reality is that building food related stores or community gardens in the communities where they are most needed continues to be hampered by decades of institutional and systemic barriers.(2)
- For example, typically people of color have issues surrounding loans to start food-related businesses. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), in 2013 nearly 86% of food-related businesses were owned by white people, 10.6% by Latinos, 7% by blacks and 4.3% by Asians. (2).
Proximity matters. Within a .5 mile (walking distance) from my home I have access to a 7-11 (a fast food, pit-stop store) and, importantly, the El Cerrito Natural Grocery Store.
Utilization
So if food were available, affordable and nearby, there is still the issue of ability to utilize the resource. Does the family know how to cook? Do they have an equipped kitchen?
Since we no longer teach shop or home economics in school, many people are no longer equipped for daily living as we have been in the past. The numbers of people who can, for instance, sew, cook, repair and set budgets, are dwindling. So if not taught in school, they need to be taught in the home. If not taught at home, then what?
Stability
Can all these conditions be met and continue to be met over time? As with most things, the support organizations are great at starting initiatives, but not great at maintaining the funds to continue them. But stability is not just for funding services, the stores need to stay open, people need jobs to buy quality food, and people need housing to cook. When all those things are hard to come by, communities fail.
US Food Insecurity Factoids
From DoSomething.Org
- 2017: 40M people struggled with hunger in the US [3]
- 2017: ~15M households were food insecure [4]
- USDA: 45M Americans rely on stipends from SNAP to buy food each month, most of these benefits go to households with kids[5]
- 22M US children rely on free or reduced-price lunch from school
- 3M US children are not eating breakfast[6]
- 15% of US rural families experience food insecurity
- 11.8% of US suburban and metropolitan families are food insecure[7]
- 2018: 22.5% of Black households and 18.5% of Latinx/Hispanic households experienced food insecurity[8]
- 2017: households with children had a substantially higher rate of food insecurity (15.7%) than those without children (10.1%)[9]
MedIndia reports on data from a 2005-17 Canadian Community Health Survey 510,010 Canadian adults. They categorized people as food secure, or marginally, moderately or severely food insecure. By the end of the study period, 25 460 people had died prematurely, with people who were severely food insecure dying 9 years younger than their food-secure counterparts (59.5 years old versus 68.9 years).
How My Workplace is Helping
I currently work at a small College on the UC Berkeley campus. While I have been at the campus for well over 30 years, the last 10 has been at the College of Environmental Design where I am the Assistant Dean of Infrastructure and IT.
Basically, I oversee all student technologies: networking, computer labs, specialty printing, AV support, technology loan office, carpentry and metal fabrication shop, digital lab, materials store, and various other aspects of student access and technology use. A very broad group of technical, student focused, operational activities.
Not long ago, the Fabrication Shop and Digital Lab coordinated building a very nice and sizeable chicken coop for Spiral Gardens, a nonprofit urban gardening center that inhabits two blocks at the end of the Santa Fe right-of-way in Berkeley-Oakland. They did this in part to teach high school students in planning and architecture the importance of community and supporting community efforts to address food insecurity.
A year later, the summer project the staff and students worked on was to build roaming vehicles that could showcase available fresh produce (the photo above), another cart could be used as a food/cooking demonstration vehicle, and another for distributing food. The electric bikes were donated, but all pulled vehicles, such as the cart above, were built in the Fabrication Shop and the Digital Lab.
Another year, the staff designed and supervised the build-out of shelving and a processing area for the student-run food pantry serving UC Berkeley students.
This year, we have started a “from our house to yours” donation area for canned food, kitchen equipment and such. This is to assist our students, many of whom are food insecure.
These are examples of how to help, using our own skills and time, those who support daily action on issues such as food insecurity. I am proud to have played a part in setting up this summer program and its support of issues affecting our communities. I am more proud of all the staff who worked on these issues from the beginning, especially: Semar, Tonia, and Elizabeth (in the pictures above).
–Patty
— ** —
Recipes: Grilled Green Peppers Salsa medium heat and great tasting.
Articles: Updated the German Cuisine page.
Tips: Always let meat sit a bit after cooking. If you cut too early juices from the meat will run out of the food and it will dry out. Further, the meat will continue to cook so if you want medium, remove from the stove, grill or oven when rarer and it will continue to cook to the style you want. I sometimes use aluminum to tent meat after it is out of the oven or off the grill, but do not let the metal touch the food.
