It's rare to get good news when it comes to hunger. But the government says there was a big drop last year in the number of people in the country struggling to get enough to eat, especially children.
Overall, 15.8 million U.S. households, or 12.7 percent, experienced what the government calls "food insecurity" at some point during 2015. That's compared to about 17.4 million households — or 14 percent — in 2014, according to a new report by the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.
When a family is "food insecure," that means they have a difficult time getting enough to eat, or the right kinds of food to eat, because they lack money or other resources.
The percentage of families that faced actual hunger — or "very low food security" — also declined. In 2015, at least some members of about 6.3 million households missed meals or experienced hunger. In 2014, about 6.9 million households had very low food security.
Most of the time, these families shield children from hunger. The adults will go without meals so the kids can eat. Still, the government says there were about 274,000 households in 2015 in which children went hungry at some point during the year. As bad as that was, it was the lowest level since before the Great Recession and a big decline from 2014 — when 422,000 families reported that their children went hungry at some point.
[For more of this story, written by Pam Fessler, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/th...ince-great-recession]
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