n at i o n a l g e o g r a p h i c • au g u s t
Millions of working Americans don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
The New Face of Hunger
By Tracie McMillanPhotographs by Kitra Cahana, Stephanie Sinclair, and Amy Toensing
Why are people malnourished in the
richest country on Earth?
By 2050 we’ll need to feed two billion more people. This special eight-month series explores how we can
do that—without overwhelming the planet.
The Future of natgeofood.com
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Kristin Hahn and her grandmother, Janet Groven, visit a weekly soup kitchen in Charles City, Iowa. “By the end of the month we have nothing,” says Groven, who also depends on a food pantry to feed her family. Of America’s 48 million “food insecure”— the modern term for the hungry—more than half are white, and more than half live outside cities. AMY TOENSING
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New York City’s Bronx borough is crammed with fast-food restaurants but has few grocery stores, earning it a reputation as a food desert. Home to America’s poorest congressional district, the Bronx has a hunger rate of 37 percent, the highest in the city.STEPHANIE SINCLAIR
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On a gold-gray morning in Mitchell County, Iowa, Christina Dreier sends her son, Keagan, to school without breakfast. He is three years old, barrel-chested, and stubborn, and usually refuses to eat the free meal he quali!es for at preschool. Faced with a dwindling pantry, Dreier has decided to try some tough love: If she sends Keagan to school hungry, maybe he’ll eat the free breakfast, which will leave more food at home for lunch.
Dreier knows her gambit might back!re, and it does. Keagan ignores the school breakfast on o"er and is so hungry by lunchtime that Dreier picks through the dregs of her freezer in hopes of !lling him and his little sister up. She shakes the last seven chicken nuggets onto a battered baking sheet, adds the remnants of a bag of Tater Tots and a couple of hot dogs from the fridge, and slides it all into the oven. She’s gone through most of the food she got last week from a lo-cal food pantry; her own lunch will be the bits of potato le# on the kids’ plates. “I eat lunch if there’s enough,” she says. “But the kids are the most important. $ey have to eat !rst.”
$e fear of being unable to feed her children hangs over Dreier’s days. She and her husband, Jim, pit one bill against the next—the phone against the rent against the heat against the gas—trying always to set aside money to make up for what they can’t get from the food pantry or with their food stamps, issued by the Supple-mental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Keagan and Cheyenne Dreier have the toys and trappings of a middle-class life, but their parents rely on donated foods—typically processed—to feed them. “It’s not like we can eat all healthy,” says mom Christina. With junk food plentiful and often cheap, hunger and obesity are now parallel problems.
Congressional cuts to SNAP last fall of !ve bil-lion dollars pared her bene!ts from $ to $ a month.
On this particular a#ernoon Dreier is worried about the family van, which is on the brink of repossession. She and Jim need to open a new bank account so they can make automatic pay-ments instead of scrambling to pay in cash. But that will happen only if Jim !nishes work early. It’s peak harvest time, and he o#en works until eight at night, applying pesticides on commer-cial farms for $ an hour. Running the errand would mean forgoing overtime pay that could go for groceries.
It’s the same every month, Dreier says. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. “We have to eat, you know,” she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. “We can’t starve.”
Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of
someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. $e image of hunger in America today di"ers mark-edly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “$is is not your grandmother’s hunger,” says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “Today more working people and their families are hungry because wages have declined.”
In the United States more than half of hun-gry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. With this new
image comes a new lexicon: In the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, peo-ple didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to million by —a !vefold jump since the late s, including an increase of percent since the late s. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. In there were a few hundred emer-gency food programs across the country; today there are ,. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in .
To witness hunger in America today is to enter a twilight zone where refrigerators are so frequently bare of all but mustard and ketch-up that it provokes no remark, inspires no
AMY TOENSING
Learn more about the Dreier family and their struggles on our digital editions.
s t o ry n a m e h e r e n at i o n a l g e o g r a p h i c • m o n t h
Mikka Drahein, four, snacks on pasta at her home in Osage, Iowa. A grain elevator next door stores some of the state’s vast output of corn and soybeans. Government nutrition guidelines encour-age eating fruits and vegetables, but subsidies support mostly the production of corn, soy, and other commodity crops.AMY TOENSING
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Dinner can be a haphazard affair for the White family. Parents Rebecca and Bob struggle to feed five children—and pay all their bills—on the $2,000-a-month salary Bob earns at the nearby Winnebago plant. Nearly 60 percent of food-insecure U.S. households have at least one working family member.AMY TOENSING
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embarrassment. Here dinners are cooked using macaroni-and-cheese mixes and other processed ingredients from food pantries, and fresh fruits and vegetables are eaten only in the !rst days af-ter the SNAP payment arrives. Here you’ll meet hungry farmhands and retired schoolteachers, hungry families who are in the U.S. without papers and hungry families whose histories stretch back to the May!ower. Here pocketing food from work and skipping meals to make food stretch are so common that such practices barely register as a way of coping with hunger and are simply a way of life.
It can be tempting to ask families receiving
food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—over-weight? "e answer is “this paradox that hun-ger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Pov-erty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-o#s between food that’s !lling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.” For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that re-sult from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side e#ect of hunger itself.
As the face of hunger has changed, so has its address. "e town of Spring, Texas, is where ranchland meets Houston’s sprawl, a suburb of curving streets and shade trees and privacy fences. "e suburbs are the home of the Ameri-can dream, but they are also a place where pov-erty is on the rise. As urban housing has gotten more expensive, the working poor have been
pushed out. Today hunger in the suburbs is growing faster than in cities, having more than doubled since .
Yet in the suburbs America’s hungry don’t look the part either. "ey drive cars, which are a necessity, not a luxury, here. Cheap clothes and toys can be found at yard sales and thri4 shops, making a middle-class appearance a#ordable. Consumer electronics can be bought on install-ment plans, so the hungry rarely lack phones or televisions. Of all the suburbs in the country, northwest Houston is one of the best places to see how people live on what might be called a minimum-wage diet: It has one of the highest
percentages of households receiving SNAP as-sistance where at least one family member holds down a job. "e Je#erson sisters, Meme and Kai, live here in a four-bedroom, two-car-garage, two-bath home with Kai’s boyfriend, Frank, and an extended family that includes their in-valid mother, their !ve sons, a daughter-in-law, and !ve grandchildren. "e house has a rickety desktop computer in the living room and a tele-vision in most rooms, but only two actual beds; nearly everyone sleeps on mattresses or piles of blankets spread out on the 5oor.
"ough all three adults work full-time, their income is not enough to keep the family con-sistently fed without assistance. "e root prob-lem is the lack of jobs that pay wages a family can live on, so food assistance has become the government’s—and society’s—way to supple-ment low wages. "e Je#ersons receive $ in food stamps each month, and a charity brings in meals for their bedridden matriarch.
Like most of the new American hungry, the Je#ersons face not a total absence of food but the gnawing fear that the next meal can’t be counted on. When Meme shows me the family’s food supply, the refrigerator holds takeout boxes and beverages but little fresh food. Two cupboards are stocked with a smattering of canned beans and sauces. A pair of freezers in the garage each contain a single layer of food, enough to !ll bel-lies for just a few days. Meme says she took the children aside a few months earlier to tell them they were eating too much and wasting food besides. “I told them if they keep wasting, we have to go live on the corner, beg for money, or something.”
Jacqueline Christian is another Houston mother who has a full-time job, drives a com-fortable sedan, and wears flattering clothes. Her older son, -year-old Ja’Zarrian, sports bright orange Air Jordans. "ere’s little clue to the family’s hardship until you learn that their clothes come mostly from discount stores, that Ja’Zarrian mowed lawns for a summer to get the sneakers, that they’re living in a homeless shel-ter, and that despite receiving $ in monthly food stamps, Christian worries about not having enough food “about half of the year.”
Christian works as a home health aide, earn-ing $. an hour at a job that requires her to crisscross Houston’s sprawl to see her clients. Her schedule, as much as her wages, in5uences what she eats. To save time she o4en relies on premade food from grocery stores. “You can’t go all the way home and cook,” she says.
On a day that includes running a dozen er-rands and charming her payday loan officer into giving her an extra day, Christian picks up Ja’Zarrian and her seven-year-old, Jerimiah, af-ter school. As the sun drops in the sky, Jerimiah begins complaining that he’s hungry. "e neon glow of a Hartz Chicken Bu#et appears up the road, and he starts in: Can’t we just get some gizzards, please?
Christian pulls into the drive-through and orders a combo of fried gizzards and okra for $.. It takes three declined credit cards and an emergency loan from her mother, who lives
nearby, before she can pay for it. When the food !nally arrives, !lling the car with the smell of hot grease, there’s a collective sense of relief. On the drive back to the shelter the boys eat until the gizzards are gone, and then dri4 o# to sleep.
Christian says she knows she can’t a#ord to eat out and that fast food isn’t a healthy meal. But she’d felt too stressed—by time, by Jerimiah’s insistence, by how little money she has—not to give in. “Maybe I can’t justify that to someone who wasn’t here to see, you know?” she says. “But I couldn’t let them down and not get the food.”
Of course it is possible to eat well cheaply in America, but it takes resources and know-how that many low-income Americans don’t have. Kyera Reams of Osage, Iowa, puts an incredible amount of energy into feeding her family of six a healthy diet, with the help of staples from food banks and $ in monthly SNAP bene!ts. A stay-at-home mom with a high school educa-tion, Reams has taught herself how to can fresh produce and forage for wild ginger and cran-berries. When she learned that SNAP bene!ts could be used to buy vegetable plants, she dug two gardens in her yard. She has learned about wild mushrooms so she can safely pick ones that aren’t poisonous and has lobbied the local li-brary to stock !eld guides to edible wild plants.
“We wouldn’t eat healthy at all if we lived o# the food-bank food,” Reams says. Many foods commonly donated to—or bought by—food pantries are high in salt, sugar, and fat. She esti-mates her family could live for three months on the nutritious foods she’s saved up. "e Reamses have food security, in other words, because Kyera makes procuring food her full-time job, along with caring for her husband, whose dis-ability payments provide their only income.
But most of the working poor don’t have the time or know-how required to eat well on little. O4en working multiple jobs and night shi4s,
It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be overweight? For many of the hungry in America, it’s an unintended side e!ect of hunger itself.
Tracie McMillan is the author of "e American Way of Eating. Photographers Kitra Cahana, Stephanie Sinclair, and Amy Toensing are known for their intimate, sensitive portraits of people.
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Two boxes of fried chicken are devoured within minutes after a neighbor drops by the Bronx apartment of Hullamatou Ceesay to share lunch with a crew of cousins. Most of America’s hungry are native-born, but new immigrants like this family from Gambia struggle too, taking meals wherever they can find them. STEPHANIE SINCLAIR
A young father braves the highways of sprawling Spring, Texas, north of Houston, to reach a homeless shelter and a free meal. The suburbs have become a new home for the hungry. The rates of poverty and of food stamp use are so high that advocates and legislators coined the phrase “the SUV poor.”KITRA CAHANA
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they tend to eat on the run. Healthful food can be hard to !nd in so-called food deserts—com-munities with few or no full-service groceries. Jackie Christian didn’t resort to feeding her sons fried gizzards because it was a"ordable but because it was easy. Given the dramatic in-crease in cheap fast foods and processed foods, when the hungry have money to eat, they of-ten go for what’s convenient, just as better-o" families do.
It’s a cruel irony that people in rural Iowa can be malnourished amid forests of cornstalks running to the horizon. Iowa dirt is some of the richest in the nation, even bringing out the poet in agronomists, who describe it as “black gold.” In Iowa’s fields produced roughly one-sixth of all corn and soybeans grown in the U.S., churning out billions of bushels.
3ese are the very crops that end up on Chris-tina Dreier’s kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweet-ened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. 3ey’re also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In it spent roughly $ billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. 3e government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In it spent only $. bil-lion to subsidize and insure “specialty crops”—the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.
3ose priorities are re7ected at the grocery store, where the price of fresh food has risen steadily while the cost of sugary treats like soda has dropped. Since the early s the real cost of fruits and vegetables has increased by percent. Meanwhile the cost of nonalcoholic beverages— primarily sodas, most sweetened with corn syrup—has dropped by percent.
“We’ve created a system that’s geared toward keeping overall food prices low but does little to support healthy, high-quality food,” says global food expert Raj Patel. “3e problem can’t be !xed by merely telling people to eat their fruits and vegetables, because at heart this is a problem about wages, about poverty.”
When Christina Dreier’s cupboards start to get bare, she tries to persuade her kids to skip snack time. “But sometimes they eat saltine crackers, because we get that from the food bank,” she said, sighing. “It ain’t healthy for them, but I’m not going to tell them they can’t eat if they’re hungry.”
3e Dreiers have not given up on trying to eat well. Like the Reamses, they’ve sown patches of vegetables and a stretch of sweet corn in the large green yard carved out of the corn!elds be-hind their house. But when the garden is done for the year, Christina !ghts a battle every time she goes to the supermarket or the food bank. In both places healthy foods are nearly out of reach. When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples. “3ey love fruit,” she says with obvious pride. But most of her food dollars go to the meat, eggs, and milk that the food bank doesn’t provide; with noodles and sauce from the food pantry, a spa-ghetti dinner costs her only the $. required to buy hamburger for the sauce.
What she has, Christina says, is a kitchen with nearly enough food most of the time. It’s just those dicey moments, a<er a new bill arrives or she needs gas to drive the kids to town, that make it hard. “We’re not starved around here,” she says one morning as she mixes up powdered milk for her daughter. “But some days, we do go a little hungry.” j
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natgeofood.comThe Future of
Hunger in America
Looking for a Decent Meal
Stranded in a Food DesertTens of thousands of people in Houston and in other parts of the U.S. live in what’s called a food desert: Their homes are more than half a mile from a supermarket, and they don’t own a car, because of poverty, illness, or age. Public transportation may not fill the gap. How do they get nutritious food? Small neighborhood mar-kets or fast-food restaurants may be within walking distance but may not accept food vouchers. And if they do, they may charge more and offer fewer nutritious options than supermarkets.
VIRGINIA W. MASON AND JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF SOURCES: USDA; CITY OF HOUSTON; U.S. CENSUS BUREAU
500 100250
City of Houston
500 100250
Households lacking a car and located more than half a mile from a supermarket
Dark orange: Households in neigh-borhoods with the greatest poverty
43,000households in Houston, Texas, have no car and are more than a half mile from a supermarket.
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The Future of Food
n at i o n a l g e o g r a p h i c • au g u s t f u t u r e o f f o o d
Top ten farm subsidies by crop 1995–2012, in billions of dollars
Top ten sources of calories for low-income invdividualsAge two and older, per person per day
Corn
Cotton
Wheat
Soybeans
Rice
Sorghum
Peanuts
Barley
Tobacco
Sunflowers0 20 40
72Beef dishes
Sodas, energy drinks, sports drinks 139Chicken dishes 122Grain-based desserts 117Yeast breads 107
Pizza 98
Pasta dishes 69Chips 62Alcoholic beverages 59
100Tortillas, burritos, tacos
Grain basedMeat basedMixed
Direct paymentsInsurance subsidiesFederal crop subsidies began in the 1920s, when a quarter of the U.S. population worked on farms. The funds were meant to buffer losses from fluctuating harvests and natural disasters. Today most subsidies go to a few staple crops, produced mainly by large agricultural companies and cooperatives.
Since 1995 just $689 million has been spent on subsidies for apples—the only fruit to get such funding.
Direct payments will cease with the 2014 Agricultural Act and be replaced with insurance subsidies.
Subsidized corn is used for biofuel, corn syrup, and, mixed with soy-beans, chicken feed. Subsidies reduce crop prices but also support the abundance of pro-cessed foods, which are more affordable but less nutritious. Across income brackets, processed foods make up a large part of the American diet.
72%of SNAP recipients are children, disabled adults, or the elderly.
17.6 million households in the U.S. don’t have adequate resources to meet their basic food needs.
VIRGINIA W. MASON AND JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF; AMANDA HOBBSSOURCES: USDA; FOOD RESEARCH AND ACTION CENTER; CENTER ON BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES; MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES; ENVIRONMENTAL WORKING GROUP; NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE
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ALA.
ARIZ.ARK.
CALIF.
COLO.
CONN.
R.I.
FLA.
GA.
IDAHO
ILL.
IND.
IOWA
KY.
LA.
ME.
MD.
MASS.
MICH.
MINN.
MISS.
MO.
MONT.
NEBR.NEV.
N.H.
N.J.
N. MEX.
N.Y.
N.C.
N. DAK.
OHIO
OKLA.
OREG.
PA.
S.C.
S. DAK.
TENN.
TEXAS
UTAH
VT.
VA.
DEL.
WASH.
W. VA.
WIS.
WYO.
KANS.
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N.Y.
ALASKA
HAWAII
D.C.
Maricopa572,00015%
Los Angeles971,000
9.8%
Cook902,00017%
Kings689,000
27%
Shannon8,09559%
Shannon8,09559% Todd
5,32055%
Todd 5,32055%
Humphreys4,74351%
Humphreys4,74351%
Mitchell5695%
Mitchell5695%
Harris587,00014%
Harris587,00014%
Owsley 2,48152%
Owsley 2,48152%
WadeHampton
4,04054%
PINE RIDGE INDIAN
RESERVATION
PINE RIDGE INDIAN
RESERVATION
ROSEBUDI.R.ROSEBUDI.R.
Bronx430,569
31%
Bennett 1,47643%
Bennett 1,47643%
Chicago
Osage
NewYork City
NewYork City
Phoenix
SpringHouston
No data
U N I T E D S T A T E S
These two Indian reservations have the country’s highest poverty rates and the highest SNAP participation rates.
Mississippi has the highest state poverty rate (24%) and the highest state SNAP recipient rate (22.5%).
The Wade Hampton census area, 93 percent Native American, strug – gles with unemploy-ment and poor schools and health services.
Recipients, in thousands
1 Los Angeles, CA 9712 Cook, IL 9023 Kings, NY 6894 Harris, TX 5875 Maricopa, AZ 572
$253.7 billiontotal in subsidies since !""#
Help for the HungryMore than $% million Americans rely on what used to be called food stamps, now SNAP: the Supplemen-tal Nutrition Assistance Program. In &'!( benefits totaled $)# billion, but payments to most house-holds dropped; the average monthly benefit was $!((.') a person, less than $!.#' a meal. SNAP recipients typically run through their monthly allot-ment in three weeks, then turn to food pantries. Who qualifies for SNAP? Households with gross incomes no more than !(' percent of the poverty rate. For a family of four that qualifying point is $(!,''# a year.* * QUALIFYING INCOMES IN ALASKA AND HAWAII ARE HIGHER THAN IN THE CONTIGUOUS U.S.
Crops taxpayers support with subsidies How subsidized crops a!ect diet
Percent of county population
1 Shannon, SD 592 Todd, SD 553 Wade Hampton, AK 544 Owsley, KY 525 Humphreys, MS 51
Counties with the highest SNAP participation in !"#"
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f u t u r e o f f o o d
Typical McDonald’s menu
Big Mac sandwich …………………… $3.99Large french fries ………………………. 2.40Fruit ’N Yogurt Parfait ……………….. 1.00Three cookies …………………………….. 1.00Large soft drink ………………………….. 1.49Total ……………………………………………. $9.88
ART: JOHN GRIMWADE AND HAISAM HUSSEIN
$10Spent on fast food Spent on
market produce
You’ve got hunger pangs, an empty refrigerator, and ten dol-lars. What kind of food will you buy, fast food or ingredients for a home-cooked meal? Time, not nutrition, is often the deciding factor. “Cooking at home requires planning ahead,” says Jessica Todd, an economist with the USDA. According to her research,
What’s for Dinner ?Typical market produce prices in Washington, D.C.
Half gallon of milk …………………… $1.99Half pound green beans ………….. 1.35One loaf wheat bread ………………. 2.49Bell pepper ………………………………….. 1.19Two bananas ……………………………….. 0.40Two chicken drumsticks ………….. 1.71Crown broccoli …………………………… 0.80Total ……………………………………………. $9.93
McDonald’s is the largest hamburger fast-food chain in the world, serving food in about !!" countries.
people ate out less often during the recession. One likely reason: more time at home to cook. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study shows that the time difference can be significant: !#$ minutes for grocery shopping, food prepara-tion, and cleanup versus %& min-utes, including travel time, for the aptly named fast food.
$10
