How Every Meal Defines Food Insecurity

Every Meal defines food insecurity by taking many factors into account. Picture a family in Minnesota, with two working parents and three kids enrolled in school. When the bus comes on Monday morning, this family’s fridge isn’t empty. If you ask most people, this is a family who’s getting by. It also might be experiencing food insecurity.

Food Is A Lot More Than Calories

The way we see it, food insecurity is the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious foods that are culturally appropriate. The “culturally appropriate” is a nonnegotiable that goes one step further than how most would define food insecurity.

A family newly arrived from East Africa, handed canned goods they don’t recognize being asked to prepare meals they don’t know how to cook is not food security. A Southeast Asian household given ingredients that don’t fit their diet or their kitchen is also not food security. 

Food security is so much more than volume because food itself is so much more than calories. It involves cookware, utensils, and knowing what to do with the ingredients you have on hand. And because food expresses a person’s culture, it is also about dignity.

It’s why Every Meal offers five culturally-tailored bag types, and why we purchase 96% of the food that we distribute. Because donated food reflects what people have to give. But purchased food can reflect the kinds of meals they actually eat.

Food Insecurity Is Not a Simple Yes/No Reality

So if the family of 5 has food in the fridge that will last the week, how can they be experiencing food insecurity? If their fridge is full but they are anxious whether their paycheck will stretch far enough to afford food, the USDA defines that as marginal food security. 

As soon as that family has to reduce the quality, variety, or desirability of their diets, that is low food security. Even if the quantity of food is unchanged, that family is now experiencing food insecurity. 

The most obvious picture of food insecurity is what the USDA would call very low food security, which is marked by eating less food, fewer kinds of food, and less consistently than before.

But food insecurity starts much earlier when families need to skip produce, switch to store brands, or use coupons for everything to put enough food in the house. That’s why 1 in 4 children in Minnesota live with food insecurity: it’s the number of kids who can’t reliably count on the food they need to grow and thrive. 

Structural Barriers Go Deeper Than a Budget

Unfortunately, budgeting more carefully doesn’t solve the problem. In some cases, in fact, structural barriers keep good food out of reach even when there’s more money available. 

Having a kitchen, working stove, or enough storage impacts whether you can turn food into meals. Immigration status shapes whether a family will approach a food resource at all, regardless of need. Where you live shapes what food is nearby. Whether you have transportation that can take you to a grocery store with high-quality food.

This is why 53.6 million Americans live in food deserts where the nearest full grocery store is more than half a mile away in the city or 10 miles away in a rural area. And why, in Minnesota, 34% of Black households experienced food insecurity in 2023, compared to 8% of white households. They are signs of systems that weren’t built with everybody equally in mind. 

What Every Meal Does to Fight Food Insecurity

The family of 5 we asked you to picture is who Every Meal is built for. Not because their need is more visible, but because food insecurity rarely looks the same for each family. It can live in the anxiety before the grocery run. Or the produce aisle that gets skipped to make the numbers work. Or the unfamiliar ingredients that never get used because nobody knew what to do with them. 

Every Meal’s response is informed by that understanding. Food delivered discreetly into backpacks, so kids don’t feel different from their classmates. Open enrollment, no paperwork, no means-testing. And five culturally-tailored bag types, because what’s right for one family isn’t right for all families. Fighting child hunger means knowing enough about it to actually meet it where it lives.  

Did something here shift how you think about food insecurity? Share it with somebody who might not know! Solving a problem starts with understanding it.