[Hunger in Vermont] [What YOU Can Do] [Measuring Hunger] [Hunger & Obesity]
[Budget of a Food Insecure Family] [Hunger Quiz]

Measuring Hunger

Poverty is the greatest risk factor for hunger. In Vermont, 15% of children live in poverty—that’s over 20,000 children. An additional 43,000 children are low-income (living below 200% of poverty). To learn more about poverty among Vermont’s children, click here.

Because hunger is more difficult to quantify than poverty or homelessness, there have been methods developed to measure a family’s risk of hunger, including:

• Food Insecurity: Adults in households determined to be food insecure are so limited in resources that they are running out of food, reducing the quality of food their family eats, feeding their children unbalanced diets, or skipping meals so their children can eat. In Vermont, 9.5 percent of all households are food insecure. This means that 19,000 children live in households that are food insecure.
  
• Food Insecurity with Hunger: Households that are classified as food insecure with hunger are those in which adults have decreased the quality and quantity of food they consume because of lack of money to the point where they are quite likely to be hungry on a frequent basis, or in which children’s intake has been reduced due to lack of family financial resources, to the point that children are likely to be hungry on a regular basis and adults’ food intake is severely reduced.