yahoo | Almost 18 million American homes struggled to find enough to eat in 2011, including 3.9 million homes with children, or 10 percent of all families with children, according to numbers released on Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Even worse off were single mothers and black and Latino households, the survey found.
As NPR notes, "People went hungry."
The survey tracked families who had some issues with finding enough food, dubbed "food insecure," and those deemed "very very food insecure," who lacked basic nutrition at some point during the year. The latter category includes some 6.8 million households nationwide in which adults skipped meals, couldn't afford balanced meals, and worried about having enough money to buy food several months out of the year.
In all, the "food insecure" represented 5.7 percent of American households. It's not much of a change compared with 2010, but it's 2 percent more—thousands of people more—since 1998.
