By Ray Nichols and Carol Hemington
Food insecurity is an official term from the USDA. It’s when people don’t have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from. It’s a big problem in the United States, where 48 million people, including 14 million children, experience food insecurity annually. However,many more people, including millions who do not meet the definition of food insecure – turn to the charitable food sector for support.
In New Jersey nearly 1.1 million people are food insecure. This number includes over 270,000 children. Stated another way, that’s 13% of all children and 11.5% of all residents of the Garden State.
What’s Happening in NJ?
The NJ Office of the Food Security Advocate has produced a data chart book on the state of food security in NJ, and profiles for each NJ county, available here.
A related issue is Food Waste, with tons of edible nutritious food going to landfills, when with better management a lot of it could be used to feed people who are unable to buy what they need. The NJ Department of Environmental Protection has produced a Food Waste Toolkit (available here), which addresses the problem from the perspective of needing waste reduction as a way of reducing the amount of food going into landfills where it decomposes and produces a substantial amount of greenhouse gases.
Organizations in the non-profit sector are feeding poor and hungry people who are unable to get sufficient nutritious food for themselves. There are five large food banks in NJ that act as wholesalers, operating warehouses that serve two functions. They are able to purchase in very large quantities, and then distribute it as needed to local food banks and soup kitchens.They also recruit volunteers to package individual lunches that are then distributed to schools for students who would otherwise go hungry. Multiple volunteer opportunities exist at both the regional and local level to help address NJ food insecurity.