Last week, the US Department of Agriculture released its annual report on household food security. They found that for the 3-year period from 2007-09, an average of 15.2 percent of Oklahoma households experienced food insecurity, which means that they “had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources.” This was the 5th highest rate in the nation, up from 14.6 percent for the period from 2004-06 and 13.1 percent from 1996-08. Nationally, food insecurity from 2007-09 averaged 13.5 percent.

Given Oklahoma’s total population of 3.7 million, and assuming that households experiencing food insecurity are the same size as the average of all households, this means that some 560,000 Oklahomans live in households that struggle with access to adequate food.  To get a clearer sense of how many people this is, imagine that on a Saturday afternoon this fall, the population in households that experience food insecurity in Oklahoma were all invited down to Norman and Stillwater to attend the football games.

Give or take a few thousand people, the food insecure could completely fill OU’s Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium (capacity: 82,122) AND OSU’s Boone Pickens Stadium (capacity: 60,218) four times over.

To find out ways to help fight hunger and food insecurity in Oklahoma, contact the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma or the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma.

May everyone have a joyful and healthy Thanksgiving holiday.

From time to time, we use the OK Policy blog to post submissions we receive from Oklahomans who have interesting perspectives on important policy issues for the state. This entry is from Sara Waggoner, Executive Director of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.

I have been in Food Banking for 28 years and just finished my 20th year as executive director of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma. I have never seen the need for emergency food programs so prevalent or the increase in requests so high.

Emergency food programs were originally established to provide food for a short period of time to families who temporarily lacked enough money to meet all of their basic needs. Providing food allowed them to use their resources to pay a utility bill, put gas in the car to get to work or buy medicine. Families usually needed help two to four times per year, occasionally six times. Over the last two and a half years, not only has the number of people requesting help increased by 40 percent in the 24 counties served by the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, but, more and more families are relying on these emergency food programs to make it through each month. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second of two blog posts on rural poverty by Mariah Levison, a graduate student in International Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, based on a presentation that Oklahoma Policy Institute gave last month at McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel. In our initial post, Mariah summarized some of the data and theories on the causes of poverty in McCurtain County. Here she examines the research on amenities based development as a strategy for addressing rural poverty. Read the rest of this entry »