For a decade, Feeding America's Map the Meal Gap (MMG) has provided sub‐state‐level estimates of food insecurity for both the full‐population and for children. Along with being extensively used by food banks, it is widely used by state‐ and local‐governments to help plan responses to food insecurity in their communities. In this paper, we describe the methods underpinning MMG, detail the approach Feeding America has used to make projections about the geography of food insecurity in 2020, and how food insecurity rates may have changed due to COVID‐19 since 2018. We project an increase of 17 million Americans who are food insecure in 2020 but this aggregate increase masks substantial geographic variation found in MMG.

Limited access to healthy food caused by food insecurity makes diabetes mellitus (DM) self-management more challenging. Using data from Hunger in America 2014 (n = 60,122 US food pantry users), we sought to understand food preferences and coping strategy utilization (e.g. choosing between paying for food and medical care) among households seeking assistance from US food pantries with and without DM members. The prevalence of wanting and not obtaining fruits, vegetables, dairy, and protein was high among all households. After adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics, households with DM members were more likely to want and not obtain fruits, vegetables, and dairy, and were also more likely to use several coping strategies to increase food access, compared to households without DM members. These results highlight the high demand for healthy food items among clients from US food pantries, particularly among households with DM, as well as the extra burden DM may place on food insecure households.

The majority of poor households in the United States are food secure which is both surprising and not well-understood. We increase our understanding by looking at a particularly vulnerable group-people visiting food pantries-through the use of the Hunger in America (HIA) 2014 data set. Along with providing information on households often overlooked in other data sets, HIA has a wide array of questions. We find, in comparison to food secure households, that food insecure households are more likely to have challenges paying their bills and are more likely to use coping mechanisms. These effects are large, especially when compared to the standard set of explanatory variables. We also find that the impact of the standard set of covariates change dramatically when we include variables that are often unobserved, suggesting that there may be biases in some of the central findings on the determinants of the food insecurity.

An extensive literature has described U.S. food insecurity and its determinants, but there has been little work on the geographic distribution of food insecurity and no work on the distribution of private food assistance by geography. To study the former, we use data from the Map the Meal Gap (MMG) project, which is broken down by Rural-Urban Continuum Codes. For the latter, we combine MMG data with data from the Hunger in America 2014 (HIA 2014) survey to determine the geographic distribution of charitable food assistance. At the national level, we find few differences across the rural-urban interface, but we do find differences within and across regions. We also find that regardless of how it is measured, the distribution of charitable food assistance is directed more toward counties with smaller populations—a finding that holds even after controlling for factors that influence the distribution of charitable assistance.

Households with a low-income in rural places experience disproportionate levels of food insecurity. Further research is needed about the nuances in strategies that households with a low-income in rural areas apply to support food security nationally. This study aimed to understand the barriers and strategies that households with a low-income in rural areas experience to obtain a meal and support food security in the United States. We conducted a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews among 153 primary grocery shoppers with a low-income residing in rural counties. A majority of family’s ideal meals included animal-based protein, grains, and vegetables. Main themes included struggles to secure food and coping mechanisms. Ten categories included affordability, adequacy, accommodation, appetite, time, food source coordinating, food resource management, reduced quality, rationing for food, and exceptional desperation. These results can inform public health professionals’ efforts when partnering to alleviate food insecurity in rural areas.