Child Hunger In America

My stomach grumbled repeatedly. I hadn’t eaten for a while, but I was used to it. Being that I only got a little bit of food and water for breakfast, I was trained to ration out my portions for the week. The hunger wasn’t something new, but this time it was a tremendous amount of pain in my stomach. I thought to myself how could being hungry make my stomach hurt so much. I overheard my parents constantly arguing about food, but I never truly understood how difficult it was. Whenever my parents called my brothers and sisters and I to come in and get food, I always saw the look my parents had on their face after we had gotten whatever food there was and they had nothing. Most of the time, all of us had nothing to eat and whenever my parents did

One out of five kids in America face hunger, and they are not getting enough food as they need. According to the USDA household food security, 16.2 million kids in America endure this travesty every day. Hunger not only causes physical ailments, but mental as well. It affects their future, their mental health, and their physical development throughout their lifetime. Hunger’s effects are not just short term, but more importantly can cause long-term disabilities. Some of the physical effects on the body caused by hunger are obesity in their later lives and hospitalization. Hunger causes academic disabilities within children as they have harder time learning as well as affects the concentration of a child. The mental effects are very devastating as well such as aggressive and anxious behaviors. Teenagers specifically who suffer from hunger are more likely to develop social disabilities and cause chaos in school. Hunger has many long-term effects on children that cause serious damage both mentally and physically. Hunger isn’t just appearing from out of nowhere and has many factors that contribute to it. The largest contributor to hunger in the world is poverty. When discussing hunger one most discuss the issue of poverty and why hunger is so dependent on

Unstable markets cause fluctuations in food product prices, which affect the majority of the population, because they live in poverty. Poverty stricken families and neighborhoods simply cannot afford most food, and when food product prices are unstable, it is almost impossible for them to get the nutrition they need to survive. “Over one billion people in the world live under one dollar a day.” (Felling 57) Given this number, it is impossible for those one billion people to afford the nutrition they need daily, let alone when the food prices fluctuate. Most of the children within these families are then undernourished and suffer the consequences hunger has due to the unstable markets within the economy. This unstableness of food prices in a region causes families and children to heavily rely on agriculture for their food and nutrition, but the lack of emphasis and funding on agricultural systems leaves children with nothing. Lack of investment in agriculture is a large part in why children and families are hungry in third world