This report is the culmination of a multi-state study on the extent to which work supports—policies to ensure families can access basics, such as health care, child care, food and housing—fill in the gaps for families whose jobs offer low wages or inadequate benefits.

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What are those “basic” needs? The JOBS NOW report assesses the cost of food, housing, health care, transportation, child care, clothing and taxes in various regions of the state, and uses that data to develop “budgets” for various family models – single-parent, two-parent, etc.

These are no-frills budgets. JOBS NOW models its food budget, for example, on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Low-Cost family food plan. None of the family budgets includes money for “luxuries” like higher education, retirement savings, vacations or restaurant meals.

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Too many children are hungry in a state that helps feed the world.

If you think childhood hunger is something seen only in places like Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region or drought-stricken Kenya, think again. At Hennepin County Medical Center, as the Minnesota lead investigator for the Children’s Sentinel Assessment Nutrition Program (C-SNAP), I and a national network of pediatricians, child development experts, and public health professionals have evaluated the health of more than 26,000 low-income babies and toddlers in six states, including Minnesota.

What have we learned? That hunger – or food insecurity, the term used by current government agencies and researchers to mean lack of access to enough food for an active and healthy life- is surprisingly common. Household food insecurity in Minnesota has ranged from 21% to 56% over the last eight years in the Hennepin county pediatrics clinics. But it’s not obvious. Hungry children are no more likely to be underweight, normal weight, or overweight than food secure children. In this country, childhood hunger isn’t an eyeball diagnosis.

teens with the lowest intake of fruit and especially vitamin C had weaker lungs compared to the others. Teens who ate less vitamin E, found in vegetable oil and nuts, were more likely to have asthma, Jane Burns and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health found.

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USDA Nutrition Briefing Room
Vulnerable Populations

Certain groups of Americans are more at risk of material hardship than others from changes in the economy or other social conditions.

These groups—which include low-income families, children, the elderly, and rural populations—are often the focus of the Nation’s domestic food and nutrition assistance programs.

“New Study Reports Strong Links Between Food Insecuirty and Negative Developmental Consequeces for Young School-age Children,” frac.org, January 2006

Food insecurity reduces reading and mathematical performance and socializing skills among school children and also increased their weight, found a study published by the Journal of Nutrition by researchers from Cornell University and the University of South Carolina. Food insecure children of both sexes, compared to those who were food secure, had small increases in math scores and reading scores over time. Poorer reading performance particularly occurred among girls.

Source: FRAC

This report examines interstate variation in household food security. Using hierarchical modeling, we identify several contextual dimensions that appear linked to household food security: the availability and accessibility of Federal nutrition assistance programs, policies affecting economic well-being of low-income families, and States’ economic and social characteristics. These dimensions comprise what we refer to as the State food security infrastructure. We find that a strong food security infrastructure particularly benefits families that are economically vulnerable yet have incomes above the poverty line.