Amidst recent news and research that more poor residents are moving to and living in the suburbs compared to previous decades and the typical image of wealthy suburban communities, use of suburban food banks may also be an indicator of these trends:

Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief charity with a network of more than 200 food bank partners, says there is a growing problem with suburban poverty, “where new clients are individuals who have never needed to rely on the charitable food system.”…

At the end of the economic boom in 2007, 13 million people or about 11% of all households were considered “food insecure,” the official term used by the government to define one’s inability to access an adequate amount of nutritious food at times during the year.

“Not everyone who is food insecure is literally going hungry,” says Mark Nord, sociologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. “Some are able to head off hunger by reducing the quality and variety of their diets. But if food insecurity is severe or prolonged, it is likely to result in hunger.”…

With that has come the increase in need among groups that were historically less vulnerable to hunger, according to the USDA’s Household Food Security in the United States annual report.

It would be interesting to see more specific data about the claims this article is trying to make: just how prevalent are hunger, food insecurity, and food stamps in the suburbs versus other areas? Without this data, this article is more about hunger in America and the already widely-reported statistic about food stamp usage. Ultimately, the article is just able to hint a possibly interesting story that would shed light on the changing nature of American suburbs.

Of course, one could go look at the USDA report cited in the article. With a quick search for the word “suburb,” here is what turns up in the 2 mentions:

Food insecurity was more common in large cities than in rural areas and in suburbs and other outlying areas around large cities. (p.6)

Across the metropolitan area classifications, the prevalence of food insecurity was higher for households located in principal cities of metropolitan areas (17.2 percent), than for those in nonmetropolitan areas (14.2 percent), and in suburbs and other metropolitan areas outside principal cities (13.2 percent).  Regionally, the prevalence of food insecurity was highest in the South (15.9 percent) and West (15.5 percent), intermediate in the Midwest (13.9 percent), and lowest in the Northeast (12.2 percent). (p.17)

Here are the figures about food pantry use:

Use of food pantries was higher in principal cities of metropolitan areas (5.0 percent) and in nonmetropolitan areas (5.9 percent) than in metropolitan areas outside of central cities (3.9 percent). The percentage of households that used food pantries was higher in the Midwest and West than in the  Northeast and South. (p.43)

It would be helpful to have comparisons to past data to see whether these figure for the suburbs has risen over the years. And while the percentages are lower for the suburbs, since more Americans live in the suburbs, there are probably larger absolute numbers of people dealing with food insecurity in the suburbs. (Quick calculations with a rough population estimate of 300 million: since at least 50% of Americans live in suburbs vs. 30% in cities, the food insecurity figures would translate into roughly 15.5 million in the cities and 19.8 million in the suburbs).