Preview

What Causes Hunger In America

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
461 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Causes Hunger In America
Hunger in America
By: Kaylee Moore Hunger is a major problem here in the United States. According to outnumberhunger.com 1 in 7 Americans experience hunger. 12 million families are hungry. There are many contributing factors to this issue. Some of these factors are unemployment, the national minimum wage, and other expenses. Unemployment could be the biggest reason people are hungry. Based on information from fortune.com, it says that the unemployment rate is at fourty percent. This means that a little less than half of Americans are unemployed. When someone is unemployed, it means that money is limited. We all know that it requires money to buy food, so when you don’t have money, you can’t have food. This is why so many Americans are struggling with hunger. Unemployment is really hard for all families, but especially for one that cannot have a meal for dinner.
…show more content…
As reported by google, the national minimum wage is only seven dollars and twenty five cents. This means that for a full time job that pays minimum wage, you only receive $15,080 a year. This causes an issue for a lot of Americans. One reason most Americans are on this minimum wage salary is because they do not go to college. According to howtoedu.org high school graduates that go to college are only 14.9%. This is one of the many reasons people in America are living off of a minimum wage salary in America. Reported by feedingamerica.org, the average cost of a meal in America is two dollars and seventy nine cents. With only a seven dollar and twenty five per hour salary, this is hard to do. So, this is one reason why many Americans are suffering from hunger and

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Growing Up Empty is a chilling account of the struggle to get enough to eat that confronts far too many Americans, especially children, in what is considered to be the wealthiest country in the world. In her book, Ms. Schwartz-Nobel tells the stories of men, women and children who are confronted with the tragedy of hunger in their lives. In a country where dieting is an art form, people still have a very difficult time believing that there are people in our great nation who cannot afford to eat. Tragically, the problem of hunger in America is still very misunderstood and has not made any major improvements over the past twenty years. Growing Up Empty was written as an update to her first book about hunger, Staving in the Shadow of Plenty which was written in the early 1980's. In Growing Up Empty, she explores the personal dimension of hunger (especially children) in the United States today and the different faces of hunger in each of her chapters; such as, Hunger and the Middle Class, Hunger and the Working Poor, Hunger and the Military, Hunger and the Homeless, and Hunger and the Immigrants and Refugees. I won't go into further detail about each of these chapters at this time, because their titles are pretty descriptive in themselves. This book is another cry for help and hopefully a means of creating a voice for the…

    • 1732 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    For many workers, especially those with few skills and minimal education, wages are simply inadequate to keep the family out of poverty. Hourly wages among families with annual incomes below twice the poverty level average $8.55, and only $8.00 among single-parent families. Wages also are very low among families that have recently left welfare: the median hourly wage for families leaving welfare in 1999 was $7.15, which was 15 percent below that year’s poverty level for a family of four. In 2001, a full-time, year-round worker earning the minimum wage of $5.15/hour earned only 58 percent of the federal poverty level for a family of…

    • 2177 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Nickel And Dimed

    • 1169 Words
    • 5 Pages

    It's a well known fact that everything in America is over priced, so with everything being over priced and citizens being under paid how are we supposed to expect citizens to survive in this rigged economy? Our economy is set up to benefit the middle-upper class and to take away from the lower class. As we stand by and say to the lower class citizens “get a job”, “work harder and longer”. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich proves that minimum wage cannot sustain the quality of life that is perceived as the American Dream let alone provide for a livable life at all. No matter how hard you work or how determined you are it just isn't possible to live and prosper off of minimum wage.…

    • 1169 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Eng 115

    • 1872 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Assignment 2.2: The Public Needs to Know – 49 Million People are Experiencing Hunger in America…

    • 1872 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Community Members: Hunger is a problem everywhere in the United States but also your community.…

    • 549 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Glt1 Task 2

    • 680 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Child hunger is a major problem in the United States. The number of children living in poverty increased 1.5 million between the year 2000 and 2005 (Food Bank for New York City, 2006). As poverty shifts food insecurity increases. This same time frame saw approximately a one million increase in children living in food insecure households. There are programs to address hunger. The three largest Federal food and nutrition assistance programs are: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and The National School Lunch Program.…

    • 680 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    All throughout America there is an epidemic of something horrible: FWP( First World problems). This is something that all first world people encounter in their lives no matter how hard they try to avoid it. One of the main FWP I often face is the over exaggeration of hunger such as when I say “I’m starving.”…

    • 307 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    minimum wage essay

    • 512 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Minimum wage has been a very controversial topic. Nowadays people just can’t survive on minimum wage. Prices are rising but yet the pay is still the same. How do they expect us to survive on eight dollars and twenty five cents?…

    • 512 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Hunger is the feeling of discomfort or debility caused by lack of food, combined with the aspiration to eat. Hunger has always been a conflict that has shadowed humanity ever since the stone age and it still preserves to be the basic struggle of humanity. Although the hunger outbreak has decreased within the decades and centuries it is yet to be entirely abolished. Hunger has decreased through methods such as agriculture, extensive food production and charities. However all of these methods do not thoroughly annihilate the concept of hunger. The reasons people are still going hungry in the United States of America are because people proceed to be malnourished due to lack of food, lack of Government involvement and low household incomes.…

    • 762 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    I think hunger still exists because of the prices and how some Americans can not afford food and cause the prices are so high like it cost 0.22$ just to buy 0.25 liters of milk and almost 50 million americans can not come up with .15$ a day and they have to save up a lot just to get a chicken breast which cost a $1.29 and that takes days…

    • 280 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Hunger in America

    • 1463 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Hunger in America can be hard to recognize. With how the economy is now, the effects of hunger are more severe. Many Americans are relying on food stamps and private organizations to help with this crisis. Millions in this nation are currently suffering from hunger in America. Half of that being from job loss. More than 12,000,000 children suffer from food insecure hunger because of limited or uncertain access to nutritious food. About 900,000 are hungry in the three- country Detroit metropolitan area alone. The hardest hits are the elderly, the unemployed, immigrants, and the mentally and physically impaired.…

    • 1463 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In new research, results show 60% of people who earn a minimum wage are female and 40% male. Also they found 83% are single persons 25 or younger. Over half of minimum wage workers 53% are full or part time students. These statistics show you that it's not only high school students that are making these wages. A little over 20% of American family's the head of the house depends on a minimum wage job for their many source of income. That might seem alarming knowing that many families must live off the same amount I make and our forced to support a…

    • 1003 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Minimum wage in the U.S. is way to low for people to live on, especially in the economy that the U.S. has today. There are many people that struggle to get money because they are forced to take such a low wage that they struggle to pay all their bills and even get food. Also, college students who are struggling to get a job right out of college will have to take a low paying job and not only will they have to pay for their food and all other necessary things, but they also have to worry about paying off college loans. They spent thousands of dollars on getting a college degree and now they will spend half their life paying it off and they can’t even use the degree. People with kids not only have to support themselves but another person…

    • 202 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In 2012 during his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama announced, “A minimum wage worker who works full time year round does not make enough to be considered above the federal poverty line” (Cooper). According to Dr. Sherry Kasper, an economics professor at Maryville College, the federal poverty line for one single individual is around $11,500 a year (Kasper). Since President Obama stated that full time minimum wage workers do not make enough money to meet the requirements to be above the federal poverty line, there are tons of people who make less than $11,500 annually and struggle financially to support themselves, let alone enough to support a family. Therefore, because the minimum wage so low, America has millions of people living in…

    • 2313 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    There is also the issue of hunger. Since this issue of hunger mostly takes place in third world countries, such as Ethiopia and other countries that make up Africa, most Americans are not affected by it.…

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays