A Washington State University study found that rates of food insecurity in the U.S. vary among members of different racial and ethnic groups.
It found, for example, that only 10% of Asian American adults who live in severe poverty are food insecure, compared to 40% of American Indian and Alaska Native adults living in severe poverty. It also found that low-income white adults had similar levels of food insecurity as low-income Hispanic adults while low-income Black adults faced more food insecurity than both those other groups.
A household whose income is below 50% of the federal poverty level is considered to be living in severe poverty, whereas a household whose income is 100% to 200% above the federal poverty level is considered to be living in near poverty.
Justin Denney, a professor of sociology at Washington State University, joins us to share more details about the study and how its findings could inform outreach efforts to communities with the greatest food assistance needs.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A new study from Washington State University found that among the poorest Americans, reported rates of food insecurity vary greatly based on race or ethnicity. For example, 40% of American Indian and Alaska Native adults who live in severe poverty reported being food insecure, but the rate was only 10% for Asian Americans in severe poverty. Justin Denney did this research. He’s a professor of sociology at Washington State University and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Justin Denney: Thanks for having me.
Miller: What prompted this new study?
Denney: I’ve been researching food insecurity for a number of years, and this particular study started with an observation, and that observation is that, at any given time, most poor households in the United States are actually food secure, which is kind of counterintuitive to our thinking.
Food insecurity is a huge issue. It’s a very important issue, and people in poverty struggle disproportionately with food insecurity. But at the same time, most of them are food secure, so we know that, we have some ideas about how that might be. But before we can really talk about why that might be, I wanted to describe what that looked like, and it turns out it’s very different by different racial and ethnic groups.
Miller: And before we get to those interesting disparities, I just want to zero in a little bit more on what you say is counterintuitive, because it was counterintuitive to me. The number that popped out to me from this study is that population-wide, only about 20% of low-income people in your study – out of tens of thousands of Americans who responded to some surveys – only 20% reported being food insecure, and this is among low-income people. So how do you explain that overall number?
Denney: Well, food insecurity in and of itself is very fluid, so we tend to think of it as a static state. That is, if you’re food insecure, you’re always food insecure, but that’s not how it works. A lot like poverty, people go in and out of food insecurity. You get a new job, you move, you make a new network that helps you access food, and suddenly you go from food insecure to food secure.
So there’s a lot of change happening, and for the most part people are scrambling a lot of the time to try to find ways to feed their families, and hopefully the majority of the time they’re successful doing that, but then there is a large share of people at any given time that are food insecure as well.
Miller: How is food insecurity actually defined, or how did you define it for the purposes of this study?
Denney: I and many researchers follow the USDA standard definition. It’s a bit broad, it’s a bit general, but it’s essentially access to adequate food for a healthy and active lifestyle, and that’s measured in a variety of different ways.
I used a way to measure it in this particular study that uses ten questions that people answer “yes” or “no” to. And essentially if they answer yes to more than two of those items, they’re considered food insecure, whereas if they’re fewer than two items, they’re considered food secure, and I can give you some examples of those questions if you’re interested.
Miller: Yeah, what do you think of as one of the more helpful questions?
Denney: I think a couple that really stick out for me are the items that ask things such as, “Are you worried that food will run out before there’s enough money to buy more?”
That’s a yes/no question. Another one is, “Are you worried that you couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals?” That’s a yes/no question. So it’s tapping into these basic essential food-based and nutrition-based things.
Miller: Does your data tell you how many people would be food insecure if it were not for various forms of food aid like SNAP benefits or food banks?
Denney: Yeah, that’s a great question. It doesn’t tell me that directly, but I can see, for example, what proportion of the sample is using SNAP. And that’s one of the things that is likely going on is that there is disproportionate access to and use of something like SNAP, which is food stamps for folks, and it’s disproportionate across racial and ethnic groups. Some groups are more likely to use food stamps when they qualify and other groups are less likely to use food stamps when they qualify.
Miller: So let’s get into some of these really fascinating and significant disparities between different ethnic or racial groups. One of your key findings, and I mentioned this briefly but now we can hear more about it, was that low-income Asian American adults only reported a 10% food insecurity rate. Nine out of ten were not answering “yes” to those questions you mentioned earlier about, “Are you worried,” for example, “that your food’s gonna run out before the end of the month?” And that 10% food insecurity rate, it’s actually lower, you report, than other groups with higher incomes. What do you think is going on?
Denney: That was one of the more interesting and surprising findings, and in fact, it’s even more interesting than that. Those were Asian American folks who were in the poorest group, this group that I classify as severe poor, so they’re under 50% of the federal poverty line. These are folks in really dire economic circumstances that seem to have more food security than even Asian American adults who were better off financially in the low income sample – folks that had greater resources than less than 50%.
Miller: That’s where it gets even more confusing. You’re saying that the poorest of the poor among Asian Americans had less food insecurity than slightly wealthier Asian Americans?
Denney: Yes, and that was one of the more interesting findings. Again, a bit counterintuitive. I think that, and I can’t get at exactly what’s going on there, but I think about a couple of different things that are happening.
If we look at all of these groups, not just Asian Americans, but if we think about why there would be differences like this among some of these other groups, and including Asian Americans, I think at least one of two things is happening.
One is, there’s again, access or utilization of things like food stamps that’s just different across groups, but the other is this idea that I and others have been looking at for a number of years trying to understand the community resources and the community strategies that groups employ when they’re in dire economic circumstances to remain food secure.
And what those strategies are could range from a number of different things. It could be that certain groups are, for example, working in particular labor sectors that give them access to food. So we could imagine, for example, a group of people, a community that works in the agricultural sector, and because of that, they’re getting access to food as a part of their job.
Another thing is something we talk about a lot in terms of the food security landscape, and that is the cohesiveness of a community, so how connected you are to your neighbors. That might have a big impact on whether you can remain food secure in dire economic circumstances.
Miller: What other demographic details stand out to you from this data?
Denney: Well, I think one of the things that comes out of this, again, related to race/ethnicity – is we had this counterintuitive finding for Asian Americans, in terms of their ability to remain food secure in dire economic circumstances.
I think one of the other things from the study that really stuck out is, if you look at that severe poor group and you look at it across racial and ethnic groups, American Indian and Alaskan Natives are struggling mightily, and especially compared to some of these groups that have such high food security.
So it makes us wonder what is happening? What’s going on? What are the specific kinds of factors that might be at play that are creating such a large disparity between, for example, severe poor American Indian, Alaska Natives and some of the other severe poor groups?
Miller: You mentioned some of the potential explanations for this, about community cohesion or willingness to access food help. Is it also possible that different groups broadly answer these questions differently, apart from some theoretically objective experience of food availability?
Denney: Yeah, absolutely, and that is a factor that we need to take into consideration and a factor that this particular study is not able to determine to what degree that might be happening; but yes, absolutely, and you could even think about that just in terms of language issues. If English is a second language, responding to these kinds of questions is going to be different than for folks who are native English speakers.
Miller: How would you go about answering the most interesting questions that the study raises? I mean, for example, what would it take to really understand why very, very low-income Asian Americans, and I should say that it’s a group that has even within it an astounding level of geographic diversity, 60% of the world is Asian. So we’re talking about people from so many different countries, but how would you start to answer the big questions that this study raises?
Denney: I think that one of the things that has to happen is, once we describe this – and this is really what is happening right now is, I’m describing the state of this issue – this gives us some clues, some signals that things are going on in some of these different communities, and we really need to drill down into some of these communities to better understand something that we don’t talk enough about, and that is, how are people remaining food secure? So we rightfully so focus on food insecurity, because it’s a very important problem that we need to try and solve.
One of the ways that we can get at that is to try and look at, and spend time in communities where food security is happening under really challenging circumstances. And if we can understand that and figure that out, maybe we can scale that up.
Miller: What implications do you think these initial findings have with all the questions that come with it? What implications do you think they should have now already for policymakers or, say, food bank managers?
Denney: Those are great questions, and I think, to start with policymakers – and then maybe move to food bank managers – policymakers, I think it really deserves investigation into these two… I set them up as two possibilities, but in all honesty, they’re probably happening to some degree in tandem, and that is, what’s happening with food assistance programs. We know that they’re unevenly utilized. We know that there are barriers, and in fact, increasing barriers to access food assistance with some of the changes to SNAP that have recently come down. How is that affecting groups disproportionately? So, trying to understand that.
And at the same time, understanding better some of these community cohesion factors. What kinds of things can we think about putting in place that makes food access more possible for these groups in challenging economic situations? I think on the policy side, it’s really digging into both sides of those things and figuring out how we can come together to understand how those are impacting food security rates.
I think for food bank managers, first of all, I just would say that they’re doing incredible work and the pressure on food bank managers is only increasing with everything that’s happening right now, so I don’t wanna act like I have the solution for food bank managers. They’re doing very important work. But at the same time, I think what it means is food banks are located in different kinds of places in different, for example, metropolitan areas, and they know a lot about their communities and where services are needed.
Miller: Justin Denney, thanks very much.
Denney: Thank you.
Miller: Justin Denney is professor of sociology at Washington State University.
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