American families today spend a bigger chunk of their income on groceries compared to the end of the last century, and a new study finds a rising percentage of U.S. families with older adults are struggling to be able to afford enough to eat.
Writing Friday in JAMA Health Forum, three public health researchers analyzed nationally representative household income data from two five-year periods.
They reported that food insecurity among families with a member 60 years or older “increased substantially” — from 1 in 8 households between 1999 (12.5%) and 2003 to nearly 1 in 4 homes (23%) between 2015 and 2019.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as not having enough to eat and not knowing where one’s next meal will come from.
Over the same 20 years, the study found that rates of “recurring” food insecurity — defined as two or more episodes of desperation — “more than doubled,” from 5.6% to 12.6% of families with older members. Rates of “chronic” food insecurity involving at least three incidents of severe hunger more than tripled when comparing the two periods, from 2% to 6.3% of the families.
The study is “the first to examine repeated bouts of food insecurity within the same families over time,” said Cindy Leung, a co-author and nutritionist teaching at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“Greater efforts should be made to ensure older adults who need food assistance can access these programs,” Ms. Leung told The Washington Times.
She said the factors contributing to rising food insecurity among older adults include “higher medical costs, high food prices and greater economic hardship.”
The study noted the importance of the social safety net, including the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, for the growing number of older adults who have struggled to feed themselves.
“Across both time periods, higher rates of food insecurity persisted among Black and Hispanic families, with lower socioeconomic status, and participating in SNAP,” the study noted.
Although the study highlighted families with an older member in the household, the problem was not limited to them: “All categories of food insecurity increased between the two time periods across all racial and ethnic and socioeconomic subgroups,” the researchers noted.
The findings come as questions of hunger has sharpened further in the wake of rising grocery prices since 2022 as U.S. inflation soared and the end of pandemic-related emergency SNAP benefits last March.
Consumer research firm Attest reported that 59.5% of the 2,000 working-age Americans surveyed last summer struggled to afford food at least some of the time. Increased demand from struggling families and a surge in illegal immigrants lining up for social services have pushed some urban charities to the limit.
Officials at the Capital Area Food Bank — which coordinates grocery donations to 400 social services in the Washington, D.C. region — distributed 16.9 million meals in Northern Virginia in fiscal 2022.
That was up from the 9.2 million meals the group’s Lorton, Virginia warehouse gave away in fiscal 2019. The group is building a larger warehouse to compensate.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 44.2 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2022.
The study published Friday noted that 5.5 million adults 60 and older experienced food insecurity in 2021.
By 2050, the researchers projected that number will “grow to more than 7 million adults” nationwide.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.