Children in 1 million more families faced food insecurity in 2022, USDA says

Food insecurity among families with children rose significantly last year after falling markedly in 2021, according to a US Department of Agriculture report released Wednesday.

Children were food insecure at times in 3.3 million households with kids during 2022, an increase of 1 million families from the prior year, the report found.

Some 8.8% of households with children were unable at times to provide adequate, nutritious food for their kids last year, compared with 6.2% in 2021.

Overall, some 17 million households, or 12.8%, had difficulty providing food for all members at some time in 2022 because of a lack of resources. That is up from 13.5 million households, or 10.2%, the year before.

Nearly all types of households saw food insecurity increase between 2021 and 2022, said Matthew Rabbitt, an economist with the USDA's Economic Research Service.

Factoring in adults, food insecurity among households with children jumped 38% between 2021 and 2022, while it rose 36% for rural households. Food insecurity in households with elderly members climbed 28%, as it did for households headed by Hispanic Americans.

"There's just a lot of precarity in the economy still," said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a social policy professor at Northwestern University. "Food is one of the few places that families kind of have the ability to cut back because you can't say, 'Let me pay half of my mortgage this month or pay half of my rent.'"