Texas tops the country in youth food insecurity, according to a recent study.

The 2022 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition report shows the world is moving backwards in efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition.828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021 – 46 million people more from a year earlier and 150 million more from 2019.

In Texas, 3,720,710 people are facing hunger and of them 1,395,890 are children.

• 1 in 8 people face hunger

• 1 in 5 children face hunger

Food insecurity and hunger are closely related but not quite the same. People who are food insecure don't have reliable, ongoing access to an adequate supply of affordable, nutritious food. Hunger is a physical condition; food insecurity reflects barriers to obtaining food such as finances, physical location and transportation.

Infants from households reporting very low food security, a measure of access to adequate and healthy meals, tend to weigh more than those from households with relatively high food security, suggests a new study led by a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The infant and specialty formula crisis offers an alarming commentary on this country’s priorities around food and hunger, particularly when it comes to ensuring that parents and caregivers have access to the safe, affordable, and nutritious foods needed for their infants’ healthy growth and development.

According to the Meal Gap study from Feeding America, the average cost of a meal in Texas is $2.76. 

Malnutrition takes a particularly high toll in infants, leading to slowed physical, cognitive, and neurodevelopment growth, including difficulties with language and speech, motor skills, behavior, memory, learning, or other neurological functions.

20%, or 1 in 5 Texas children experiences hunger. Hunger deprives kids of more than just food. According to Feeding America, kids who don’t get enough to eat — especially during their first three years — begin life at a serious disadvantage. When they’re hungry, children are more likely to be hospitalized, and they face higher risks of health conditions like anemia and asthma. As they grow up, kids struggling to eat are more likely to have problems in school and other social situations.

The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “This is not your grandmother’s hunger,” says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at the City University of New York.