This just in from the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC): More than 26.3 percent of households with children in Ohio reported they suffered from "food hardship" (an inability to afford enough food) in 2009-2010.
FRAC announced the numbers in the latest report in its “Food Hardship in America" series, which analyzes data that were collected by Gallup and provided to FRAC. FRAC has analyzed responses to the question: “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”
Some food hardship details for Ohio:
•In 2009-2010, 26.3 percent of households with children in Ohio said they were unable to afford enough food. The food hardship rate for households without children was 16.6 percent.
•All but two congressional districts in Ohio had more than one in four households with children reporting food hardship in 2008-2010.
Ohio Food Hardship 2009-2010:
National Rank: 20th
Households with children 26.3%
Households without children 16.6%
"These data demonstrate...that this is not the time to make our safety net weaker," said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, director Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, "and Congress must ensure that all deficit negotiations protect nutrition programs and other parts of the safety net that help low-income people.”
The data were gathered as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index project, which has interviewed more than one million households since January 2008.
In 16 of Ohio’s 18 Congressional districts at least one in four households with children answered “yes” to the question: “Were their times over the past year when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”
Find out more at FRAC’s website http://frac.org/pdf/aug2011_food_hardship_report_children.pdf
Find out more at OASHF’s website: http://admin.oashf.org/uploads/news/Food_Hardship_2011_Release_081111.pdf