How to Think About Food Insecurity

The federal measure runs on a ladder. At the top, a household is food secure: steady access to enough food for every member, all year. Below that line sits food insecurity, and it has two rungs. Low food security means trouble getting enough food and a lower-quality diet, sometimes with less variety, but little or no drop in how much people eat. Very low food security is the harder floor, where people skip meals, shrink portions, and sometimes go a whole day without eating because the money is gone.

This matters because the word hunger points at the body, a physical feeling in one person. Food insecurity points at the household budget, a condition you measure with a survey rather than read on a face. By the federal count, 13.7 percent of American households were food insecure in 2024. That is about 18.3 million homes holding 47.9 million people. The most severe rung, very low food security, reached 5.4 percent, roughly 7.2 million households. In all, 14.1 million children lived in food-insecure homes.

A second number describes a program, not a condition. About 41.7 million people a month received SNAP, the country's largest food benefit, in the 2024 fiscal year, close to one in eight Americans. A third number counts the people who turn to food banks in a given year, and it spikes in a crisis. SNAP caseload, the household survey, and the pantry line each measure a different thing. Mashed into one figure they mislead; kept apart they tell you how wide the problem runs, who the government reaches, and who is left at the charity door.

In 2021, food insecurity was 10.2 percent of households, the lowest in USDA's yearly series, which begins in 2001, and statistically no different from 2019, before the pandemic. That was not the reward of a booming economy; the economy was still shaking off a pandemic, so prosperity does not explain why hunger did not rise. An unusual run of public support was in place: expanded SNAP, stimulus payments, an enlarged Child Tax Credit, free school meals. By the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' reading, the SNAP increases and other temporary policies helped keep hunger from rising. Money reached households, and the pandemic did not push more of them into going short of food.

Then the supports came off and prices climbed. By 2023 the rate was back to 13.5 percent, and in 2024 it held at 13.7. The one-year move from 2023 to 2024 was small enough that the government's own statisticians call it flat. What changed was the climb back up out of 2021. The line held low while help was high, and rose as pandemic relief expired and food prices climbed. The whole experiment, and the 2025 decision to run it again, is traced in When the Aid Stops.

The strongest predictor of an empty cart is a thin wallet. In 2024, nearly 40 percent of households below the federal poverty line were food insecure, against the 13.7 percent national rate. The condition follows income, not nutrition education, not willpower, not a missing recipe. Overwhelmingly, people who are food insecure are people who do not earn enough to cover their costs.

Locally that gap has a number. Just Economics of Western North Carolina set a living wage for a single adult in Buncombe County at $24.10 an hour for 2026. A great deal of the work that keeps Asheville running pays well under that. The distance between what a job pays and what rent and groceries cost is the same distance that turns up, months later, as a cart with less in it. That is arithmetic about pay and prices, not a flaw in the person pushing it.

The problem is also more rural than the Asheville skyline suggests. Feeding America's modeled county estimates, which run roughly two years behind, place about 86 percent of the counties with the highest food-insecurity rates in rural America. In those estimates for 2024, four of the seven counties bordering Buncombe ran higher than Buncombe itself, and in rural communities across the mountains, reaching a grocery store can mean a thirty-minute drive. That Buncombe runs lower than most of its neighbors is not the comfort it sounds like. Distance is the rural version of the problem. The city has its own. In the Census Bureau's 2020 to 2024 estimates, 13.9 percent of Asheville renter households had no vehicle, against 1.8 percent of the households that owned their home. Of the city's households with no car, 87.7 percent were renters.

The first is SNAP, a federal benefit loaded onto a card each month and spent like cash at the grocery store. It reached about 41.7 million people a month in the 2024 fiscal year. The second is the charitable food system, the network of food banks and pantries that collects most of the donations and most of the public's attention.

SNAP reaches fewer people now. USDA's preliminary count puts May 2026 enrollment at 36.6 million, down about 13 percent in a year. The fall comes after the 2025 budget law cut refugees, asylees and other groups of lawfully present immigrants out of SNAP and widened the three-month work rule. It raised the rule's top age from 54 to 64, cut the exemption for living with a child from a child under 18 to a child under 14, struck the exemptions for veterans, former foster youth, and people who are homeless, and made it harder for places short of jobs to be waived from the rule. It also added an exemption for American Indians. Who Loses SNAP Now follows who is leaving and why.

The ratio is not close. By Feeding America's accounting, the federal program provides roughly nine meals for every one its network of about 200 food banks provides, a gap laid out to scale in Why Food Banks Can't Fix Hunger. That single fact reframes a familiar instinct. Giving to the food bank is good and needed. It cannot substitute for the federal benefit, because the two work at completely different scales. MANNA FoodBank, the region's own food bank in Mills River, draws the same boundary about its own work: no amount of philanthropy can stand in for the federal benefit once it is pulled away.

There is a recent test of what happens when it is pulled away: when pandemic-era SNAP emergency allotments ended in early 2023 in the 35 states and territories still paying them, a measure of food insufficiency among SNAP participants there rose within months. An earlier study of the 18 states that ended them sooner found results that, applied to the whole country, meant roughly 2 million more Americans without enough to eat. That experiment, and the country's decision in 2025 to cut SNAP again, this time in permanent law, is laid out in When the Aid Stops.

Before Hurricane Helene, roughly one in five adults across Western North Carolina reported limited or uncertain access to food, according to a 2021 regional health survey. In Buncombe County, about 25,000 residents relied on SNAP as of mid-2026, down from about 29,000 in April 2025. These are not, for the most part, people at the edge of homelessness. They are the far larger group feeling the squeeze early, at the grocery store.

Then, on September 27, 2024, Helene hit all of it at once. The storm cut off food supply, pushed families out of work and out of housing, and drowned MANNA's own warehouses on the Swannanoa River, hurrying the food bank into the Mills River warehouse it was already arranging to move to. The region's pantry traffic, already heavy, has not come back down. MANNA's food pantries now log more than 220,000 visits a month on average by its own count, MANNA says need is at the highest level in its more than four decades of serving the region, and the line has not returned to its pre-storm level.

Where that food strain leads, when no one catches it, is the subject of a companion piece in this work. Hunger and homelessness are one strain read at two moments, the skipped meal arriving long before the lost home. That timeline is laid out in Before the Tent.