Food insecurity, or the inability to access sufficient food, affected nearly 50 million Americans in 2010. Although typically defined as a household-level condition, there is a growing consensus that the roots of individual and family-level hunger may also be a function of the communities in which food-insecure people reside. In a recent report, Justin T. Denney, Sarita Panchang and I — using nationally representative data for a cohort of American children linked with U.S. Census data — assess the types of neighborhoods in which food-insecure children live, as well as whether neighborhood social characteristics are associated with food insecurity after accounting for family-level socioeconomic factors.
We find that children living in neighborhoods characterized by a high proportion of Hispanic, foreign-born and linguistically-isolated residents are more likely to be food insecure. In addition, we find that children who remain food insecure throughout the study — between kindergarten and third grade — live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Taken together, our findings are a strong indication that there are community-level contributors to food insecurity, and that a policy focus on providing food assistance to individual families and households overlooks the importance of the context in which these families live.
This identification of where children with low food security live can aid policymakers in framing, targeting and promoting programs to alleviate child hunger. This research also may aid in creating new types of policies that can target neighborhoods rather than households, a practice likely to be more efficacious. This approach would have the additional advantage of reaching families who might need, but not be eligible for or knowledgeable about, existing assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC); it may also address the perceived stigma associated with receiving current federal nutrition assistance. For example, a program aimed at increasing healthy foods access in neighborhoods with a high proportion of foreign-born residents could be successful in reaching high-risk citizen children in non-citizen families who, while eligible for most public assistance programs, have low take-up rates of existing programs due to language barriers as well as immigration enforcement fears.
In addition, this work can shed light on the stubborn policy issue of why some families are stuck in a state of food insecurity. It is our contention that policies aimed at alleviating food insecurity at the individual and household levels that ignore contextual factors like neighborhood characteristics are unlikely to address the root causes of the epidemic, which are structural and systemic.
- Download “Individual, Family, and Neighborhood Characteristics and Children’s Food Insecurity” in the Feb. 24, 2012, issue of the Journal of Applied Research on Children.
Rachel Tolbert Kimbro is an assistant professor of sociology, a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, and the director of the Urban Health Program at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.