Food insecurity in the U.S.A.

The news that I watched this evening carried a news story from Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (my big boss) on food security in the U.S. A recently released USDA report estimates that nearly 50 million Americans had difficulty getting enough to eat in 2008. This represents one in seven households, a sharp increase from one in ten food-insecure households estimated just one year earlier, in 2007. Secretary Tom Vilsack described this report as an alarming wake-up call, and a direct result of the effects of the recession we are going through, with widespread unemployment and rising poverty levels. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters that are outright hungry multiple times during the year, rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million. This was last year. Who knows what the statistics will be for this year. While we are preparing for that big Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps we need to be reminded that a staggering percentage of the world's population goes chronically hungry, and that even here in the U.S., many households are barely getting by. As much as we may feel that we struggle to get by, we really are better off than the vast majority of the world's population, and Thanksgiving is a good time to be grateful for what we do have.