Causes of Hunger in the U.S.

In the United States, hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food. There is more than enough food to feed everyone. We have the infrastructure to deliver it. There is a network of interstate highways and a trucking industry ready to move mountains of food daily wherever it needs to go. The supermarket store shelves are stocked to the ceiling. But none of this matters if customers have no money in their pockets. Poverty spoils every meal.

Poverty in the United States has been measured for decades; measuring hunger, or what the U.S. government is more comfortable calling food insecurity, is a more recent phenomenon. Once annual food insecurity data was collected, beginning in 1995, it became clear that the ups and downs in food insecurity line up closely with the changes in poverty. The United States has done a much better job fighting hunger than it has poverty. Hunger is a simpler issue in some ways. The Food Stamp Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), the National School Lunch Program, and 12 other nutrition programs run by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) serve millions of U.S. residents every day. All of these resources are needed, and when government programs are not enough, there is also a robust network of emergency food providers to fill the gaps.

The ancient Chinese maxim still rings true: Feed a man a fish and he eats for a day—teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Families become hunger-free when they can provide for themselves. The solution is simple: jobs that pay enough for a family to live on