Food Insecurity Rates Rise Steeply with Recession

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 percent to 22.6 percent between 2007 and 2008.  This is the largest year-to-year change seen in the dataset since 2001.  The increase is an indication of the economic hardships facing low-income families with young children.  This data 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 in late fall.