Rural Hunger Is the Real Story

The counties with the highest food-insecurity rates in the United States are disproportionately rural. By Feeding America's county-level estimates, more than eight in ten of them, about 86 percent, are rural rather than urban. The reasons stack on each other. Rural incomes run lower. Work is scarcer and more seasonal. And the nearest full grocery store can be a thirty-minute drive on mountain roads, if the town still has one at all. Distance is itself a cost, paid in gas and time by the people who can least spare either.

These are modeled estimates, and they trail the present by about two years, so read them as the shape of the problem rather than today's exact count. The shape is plain enough. Hunger gathers where groceries, jobs, and transportation are thinnest, and in this part of the country that means the mountains, not the city in the middle of them.

In Buncombe County, about 25,000 of some 280,000 residents use SNAP, roughly one in eleven (down from about 29,000 in spring 2025). In five of the seven counties that border it, the share is higher: about one in seven in McDowell and about one in six in Rutherford. Farther west, in Graham County, it is also about one in seven. Two neighbors run lower. In Henderson and Transylvania, to the south, the share is below Buncombe's.

SNAP participation counts who enrolls, not everyone who struggles, so it is not the same measure as the food-insecurity rate. It points the same direction, though. Buncombe's own food-insecurity rate was about 17 percent in the newest county estimates, for 2024, above the national rate of about 14 percent. Four of the seven counties that border it ran higher, up to about 19 percent in Rutherford. Madison matched it, and Henderson and Transylvania ran slightly lower. By this measure Buncombe sits near the middle of the mountain counties around it.

The first is the store itself. Wide stretches of these counties are food deserts, where the closest supermarket is many miles and one working vehicle away. When the only grocery in a small town closes, there is no second option down the street. Helene made that literal even inside Buncombe County: in Swannanoa, about 15 minutes east of Asheville, the Ingles that anchored the town's food supply was knocked out and had not reopened as of January 2026. In October 2025, residents with cars drove to Black Mountain for groceries, and those without faced a long bus ride.

The second is income. Rural mountain work pays less, and in several of these counties runs more seasonal; the storm cut tourism jobs and destroyed farm crops at once. The third is the road. When Helene washed out highways and bridges, it cut some communities off from food entirely for days, and in the most remote places the repairs are still unfinished. A flood that was hard in Asheville was isolating in the hollows.

Asheville's visible economy, the tourism, the food scene, the cranes on the skyline, makes it easy to assume the region has its hunger handled. In many of the places just past the county line, the numbers run higher. A lower rate in Buncombe is not evidence that Western North Carolina is doing fine; the higher rates sit in most of the smaller counties around it, where fewer people live. The work we care about does not stop at the county line, and the need does not either.