Toward a national hunger count

Efforts to measure the incidence of hunger in America have been ongoing since the late 1960s, but researchers have been unable to arrive at a consensus on the magnitude of the problem. In part the issue has been establishing a definition of hunger that is meaningful in the American context of abundance, This has meant moving from atl initial preoccupation with malnutrition to an understanding of hunger in ter ms of perceived food insufficiency and food insecurity, where the latter connotes die inability to rely on conventional means of food acquisition as well as the need to resort to various coping strategies. Surveys that measure food insufficiency and insecurity suggest that roughly 10 million Americans can be classified as hungry.