Thanksgiving dinner is not a sure thing for 1 in 8 MD households

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and for many of us that means looking forward to a big dinner with family. Yet for 1 in 8 Maryland households Thanksgiving is just another day spent struggling to put food on the table.

Between 2008 and 2010 an average of 12.5 percent of all households in the state were food insecure, meaning they struggled to pay for enough quality food for every member of the household at some point during the year. Of those 276,250 households, almost 41 percent had “very low” food security, meaning that they had to skip meals or otherwise significantly reduce their food intake at some point during the year due to a lack of resources.

Unsurprisingly, the Great Recession has had an outsize effect on hunger in Maryland. The share of households that were food insecure averaged 8.6 percent in the three years prior to the recession, essentially unchanged from the 8.7 percent average between 1996 and 1998. Since the beginning of the recession and after its official end in June 2009, the average share of households who were food insecure jumped roughly 45 percent.

Funding is threatened for state and federal programs that fight hunger every day. These include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly “Food Stamps”), the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, school lunch and breakfast programs, and senior nutrition programs like congregate meals. As the state economy fails to recover, the demand on these programs continues to grow. Here is our earlier report on the exploding number of SNAP recipients.

The increasing number of hungry Marylanders is a sobering reminder that the governor and General Assembly need to take a balanced approach to balancing the FY2013 budget. Further cuts to services will have real consequences for struggling families. The state should make strategic use of new revenue streams to maintain the strength of Maryland families.