I Need Food! Stat!

I’ve addressed this before, but one of my biggest pet peeves and one of the top 5 threats to our nation behind lawyers, Obama’s domestic policy, Obama’s foreign policy, and “moderate Republicans” are soft scientists (social, climate, et al) and bullshit statistics (they are joined like a good marriage and thus go together). Only 11 million illegals, 10% gay, anthropogenic global warming and 1/6 in America are “food insecure”.

FOOD INSECURE. Does that even mean anything? Why yes it does. It means you “feel worry”. I read this piece from Charles Lane the other day in the Washington Post on food insecurity and a new “study” by the USDA on food issues. Here’s the op-ed and a taste:

Many families are struggling in today’s economy, and this has hurt their food budgets. This week an Agriculture Department study showed that 16.4 million U.S. households containing 49.1 million people experienced “food insecurity” in 2008, up from 12.2 million households containing 36.2 million people in 2007. Fortunately, Congress has already addressed some of the problem with a significant food-stamp boost in the stimulus package adopted in February.

But is “hunger” widespread in America these days? That is the misleading impression created by press coverage of the USDA study. Headlines in the New York Times print edition (“49 Million Americans report a lack of food”), USA Today (“1 in 6 went hungry in America in 2008”), and The Washington Post (“America’s economic pain brings hunger pangs”) made it sound as if famine stalks the land. The stories were salted with terms such as “alarming” and “dramatic.”

When you crack into the data, however, they don’t support this dire portrayal. The USDA report is based on a survey of 44,000 households. They were asked if, and how, a lack of funds affected their eating habits. The first question was whether the respondent had ever “worried” about running out of food in the previous 12 months — not actually run out of food, just worried about it. A “yes” answer counts as “food insecurity.” Adults are asked if they ever lost weight due to a lack of food money — but not how much weight, or what they weighed before. In theory, a 300-pound man who lost a pound could count as “food insecure.” Similarly, the questionnaire asks whether parents “cut” their kids’ portions at any point in the last year — without specifying what the portions were before and after. [Clarification, 2:30 p.m.: Three or more "yes" answers here and your household is "food insecure."]

The numbers work this way…. I was watching an episode of Entourage this fall and Matt Damon appeared in a guest role (playing himself) where he was badgering the lead character (a fictional movie star named Vincent Chase) into giving time and money to a food charity. The “1 in 6 are hungry” number and the food insecure number was the cudgel used to batter Chase to giving a fat check. This claptrap percolates throughout our culture even to those who don’t read newspapers (which is oh… 98% of Americans don’t read newspapers. See how easy it is to pull numbers out of your ass hat?)

Lane closes with this:

We do know, though, that 2008 was the best year in eight decades for food affordability. It took 5.6 percent of income to feed an average family of four, according to USDA — the lowest share since 1929. To be sure, poor families must spend a greater percentage. But, overall, Americans devote less of their budgets to food than people anywhere else in the world, according to USDA.

USDA released this report as Secretary Tom Vilsack is seeking more money for the nutrition programs that make up 70 percent of his agency’s budget. So it’s no surprise that he contributed to the hype, just a bit, by calling on “America to get very serious about food security and hunger.” But the notion that millions of Americans are starving defies common sense. Look at the people on the street today: Based on that, would you say that America has a hunger problem or an obesity problem?

In fact, on the very day that the USDA issued its report, Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of the department of health policy and management at Emory University in Atlanta, released a survey showing that, if present trends continue, 43 percent of Americans will be obese by 2018.

This recession and its attendant hardships are very real, and we must address them. But there’s no need to exaggerate.

Now we get to the heart of it. Lily-gilding by the USDA for budget. The need for perspective is also paramount. The danger of overstating the problem will result in less charitable donations as people look around, see fat people everywhere and figure it’s not a problem at all. There are places where food is an issue — usually in rural poor communities. Most of the other problems (let’s guess and say 74.2%) are matters of child neglect and abuse. Get off your ass parent and feed your kid.

Here’s a link to the USDA report.

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