Legislative Update: Hunger - May 03, 2024 Windham Independent
Legislative Update: Hunger
This session, we already stopped two bad bills from becoming law (HB601 and HB1212, both of which I already wrote about), and the Finance committee recently had public hearings and work sessions on SB499, another hunger related bill.
To make good policy, one has to identify a problem, measure and understand it well, then design the right solution.
We know there is a hunger issue in New Hampshire… but unfortunately, the federal government makes it impossible to properly measure how large of a hunger problem we have.
Everyone that testified to support these bills relies on statistics gathered using US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS) definitions. But USDA-ERS statistics do not measure hunger - they measure food insecurity:
- “Low food security: reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake.
- Very low food security: reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.”
Most people would agree that the second bullet point is a reasonable definition of hunger, and if those numbers were reported, we could use them to start looking into whether government intervention is needed in the areas not already covered by the many charities that are already assisting people who are in need of additional food.
But every supporter of this bill (legislators, charities, constituents) only quotes the food insecurity numbers when talking about hunger, making it impossible to judge the actual number of people who would benefit from such legislation.
Not only that… but those numbers are even less credible when looking at the question asked by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, the high-frequency survey that seems to be the source of most reported data.
The survey asks “whether there was enough food, or enough of the kinds of food household members wanted to eat, available in the prior seven days. If an adult being surveyed answered that there was often or sometimes not enough to eat, or that there was enough to eat but not always the kinds of food that household members wanted to eat, then that respondent would be considered to be facing “food insufficiency.””
That question greatly overestimates the number of people dealing with food insecurity, since while my family is definitely NOT food insecure, we are financially disciplined and frequently substitute perfectly healthy, good quality, affordable food instead of buying the much more expensive food we would always want to eat if money was no object.
Therefore, my family and many other families like ours would be counted as “Food insecure” and included in those statistics that everyone reports when talking about hunger. As if…
I used to work as a computer programmer, and the above is a perfect illustration of the “garbage in, garbage out” programming saying: incorrect input into a program generates incorrect results.
Which is why, despite the good intentions of their supporters, these bills are bad policy - they are designed using very poor quality data that greatly overstates the reported numbers. Which is par for the course for data reported by the federal government, but that’s a different discussion.
I am always happy to engage with Windham residents on my legislative work - you can reach me on legislative matters at 603-267-4142 (call or text), or at dpm@leg.state.nh.us.
Daniel Popovici-Muller
Windham Representative
Clerk, Division II
House Finance Committee