Data 608 Story 6

What is the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the US

Author

Yana Rabkova

Instructions

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization publication, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 (https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/cc0639en) might lead one to the conclusion that it’s an elsewhere problem. That the people who are suffering malnutrition and starvation are “elsewhere”, not in our backyard. For this assignment you will need to take a closer look here at home (the US).

Notes:

  1. You will need to locate and source data that reflects food security and nutrition by state broken down by men, women, children and by age groups

  2. Your analysis should demonstrate correlations that exist between level of poverty and food insecurity, malnutrition and starvation.

  3. Your data and analysis should also indicate what happens to the children as they mature into adults. Will they become fully functional citizens or will they require continued support?

  4. You data visualizations need to tell the story for a political audience that you were lobbying to address the issue of food insecurity in the US

  5. This assignment is due at the end of the week twelve of the semester.

For this analysis, I used data from the USDA Economic Research Service’s Food Security in the United States dataset.

Food insecurity exists in every state, ranging from 7.4% in New Hampshire to 18.9% in Arkansas, with clear regional patterns. Arkansas (18.9%), Texas (16.9%), Mississippi (16.2%), and Louisiana (16.2%) exhibit the highest rates, with a clear concentration of elevated food insecurity across the Southern states. The 11.5 percentage point difference between the highest and lowest state rates demonstrates that policy and economic conditions at the state level significantly influence food security outcomes.

Warning: There was 1 warning in `mutate()`.
ℹ In argument: `Very low food security-percent = as.numeric(`Very low food
  security-percent`)`.
Caused by warning:
! NAs introduced by coercion

Household composition emerges as a critical determinant of food insecurity risk. Single mothers with children face a food insecurity rate of 34.7%, nearly three times the national average of 13.5% and more than triple the rate of married couples with children (11.1%). This stark disparity highlights the intersection of gender, family structure, and economic vulnerability, with one in three single-mother households unable to consistently provide adequate food for their families.

[1] "Number of rows: 26"
# A tibble: 6 × 11
   Year Category             Total Food-secure househol…¹ Food-secure househol…²
  <dbl> <chr>                <dbl>                  <dbl>                  <dbl>
1  1998 Households with Chi… 38036                  31335                   82.4
2  1999 Households with Chi… 37884                  32290                   85.2
3  2000 Households with Chi… 38113                  31942                   83.8
4  2001 Households with Chi… 38330                  32141                   83.9
5  2002 Households with Chi… 38647                  32267                   83.5
6  2003 Households with Chi… 40286                  33575                   83.3
# ℹ abbreviated names: ¹​`Food-secure households-1,000`,
#   ²​`Food-secure households-percent`
# ℹ 6 more variables: `Food-insecure households-1,000` <dbl>,
#   `Food-insecure households-percent` <dbl>,
#   `Households with food-insecure children-1,000` <dbl>,
#   `Households with food-insecure children-percent` <dbl>,
#   `Households with very low food security among children-1,000` <dbl>, …

Child food insecurity improved from 2013-2019 but has surged to 17.9% in 2023, approaching Great Recession levels. This recent deterioration signals that current interventions are failing to protect vulnerable families.

`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'
Warning: Removed 1 row containing non-finite outside the scale range
(`stat_smooth()`).
Warning: Removed 1 row containing missing values or values outside the scale range
(`geom_point()`).
Warning: Removed 1 row containing missing values or values outside the scale range
(`geom_text()`).

The strong positive correlation between state poverty rates and food insecurity rates confirms that hunger is fundamentally an economic issue. States with higher poverty rates consistently exhibit higher food insecurity, demonstrating that insufficient income is the primary driver of food access challenges. This relationship underscores that addressing food insecurity requires broader economic interventions perhaps beyond food assistance programs alone.