Nearly one in six Maryland residents reported not having enough money to buy food one or more times last year, according to a report [PDF] released Feb. 28 by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).
In a nation-wide poll, 16.2 percent of Maryland respondents said they were unable to afford enough food in 2012, placing it at 34th in the nation for the highest rates of food hardship. This number is down just slightly from last year’s rate of 16.3 percent.
FRAC published its findings in the report Food Hardship in America 2012. The report provides data on food hardship – the inability to afford enough food – for every region, every state, every Congressional District, and 100 of the country’s largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), including the Baltimore-Towson MSA in Maryland.
The report found that the national food hardship rate was 18.2 percent in 2012.
For Maryland, the poll also found:
- For the Baltimore-Towson MSA, the food hardship rate for 2011-2012 was 15.9 percent
- Maryland’s rate was higher than the regional average. For the Mid-Atlantic region, 15.9 percent say they were unable to afford enough food
Gallup collected the data for FRAC’s food hardship report as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index project, which has been interviewing almost 1,000 households daily since January 2008. FRAC analyzed responses to the question: “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”
The full report is available at frac.org
