{"id":18251,"date":"2011-03-29T22:28:39","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T02:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aroundfortwayne.com\/news\/?p=18251"},"modified":"2021-04-12T21:14:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T01:14:23","slug":"study-paints-a-detailed-portrait-of-food-insecurity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aroundfortwayne.com\/news\/2011\/03\/29\/study-paints-a-detailed-portrait-of-food-insecurity\/","title":{"rendered":"Study paints a detailed portrait of food insecurity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"food<\/p>\n

News release from Community Harvest Food Bank announcing a new study looking at food insecurity in Indiana:<\/p>\n

Unprecedented\u00a0new study paints a detailed portrait of food insecurity in Indiana<\/strong>
\n40 Percent of the More Than One Million Food Insecure in Indiana\u00a0Do Not Qualify for Federal Assistance<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Indianapolis, Indiana (March 28, 2011) – Feeding Indiana’s Hungry, the state’s food bank association, and Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released a landmark study, “Map the Meal Gap,” providing the first detailed look at the food budget shortfall of families struggling with hunger in Indiana each year – an estimated total of $389,851,730.<\/p>\n

“Just over one million Hoosiers are food insecure. Of them, 40 percent do not qualify for food stamps or other government programs. To fill this meal gap, these Hoosiers often must rely on the food bank network of Feeding Indiana’s Hungry and other charities to help feed themselves and their families,” said Emily Weikert Bryant, Executive Director of Feeding Indiana’s Hungry. “Although our member food banks distributed more than 60 million pounds of food last year, the Meal Gap for food insecure Hoosiers is 171,683,370 meals. Clearly the charitable hunger relief sector can’t do this job alone.”<\/p>\n

The study takes a look at meals in a whole new way, using county-level data on food costs from The Nielsen Company to break down the food budget shortfall of our residents into an approximation of the meals missing from the tables of people at risk of hunger in Indiana each year.<\/p>\n

Although “Map the Meal Gap” showed that Indiana’s food costs at $2.27 per meal are lower than the national average of $2.54, Indiana’s food insecurity rate of 16.2 percent in 2009 was up more than a percent from the previous year, with some Indiana counties like Fayette, Elkhart, Howard, and LaGrange clearing 20 percent of the population experiencing food insecurity.<\/p>\n

Map the Meal Gap provides the following data for Indiana and all 92 counties in an interactive map format:<\/p>\n