Food Insecurity Rates Rise Steeply with Recession

Posted on July 15, 2009

In this brief, Children's HealthWatch finds that the prevalence of food insecurity in a five-city sample of low-income families with young children increased from 18.5 to 22.6 percent between 2007 and 2008. This is the largest year-to-year change seen in the dataset since 2001 and suggests that we are likely to see significant increases in food insecurity when the U.S. Department of Agriculture issues its own statistics for 2008 later this year.