A new study by Washington State University sociology professor Justin Denney found that food security and insecurity vary significantly among U.S. ethnic and racial groups—and that some of the lowest income members of certain demographic groups show surprising resilience to food and nutrition challenges. Spotlight spoke with Denney recently; the transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit of the genesis behind this work.
Sure. I've been researching food insecurity for years and there's this kind of counterintuitive observation that we’ve known about for some time, but we don't fully understand it. And that is that most poor households are actually food secure at any given moment. And that's a bit counterintuitive when we think about food insecurity. Now, that doesn't downplay the severity of the problem; lots and lots of folks are food insecure in one of the wealthiest nations in the world. And if you look at lower-income folks in particular, a disproportionate number of them are food insecure at any given point. But still the majority of them are food secure. We have some ideas from the literature about how that might be. But I'm trained as a population health scientist, and so I see these things and I'm interested in them, but the first thing that we really need to do is drill down into that, understand it and describe it. That's what I wanted to do here was describe food security status by racial and ethnic identity for lower-income Americans.
What was the sample size and how did that work?
The sample size is quite large. I put together multiple years of what's called the National Health Interview Survey, which contacts roughly 50,000 households a year. They don't recontact, so it's basically one interview—they're just trying to get a snapshot. You can take those snapshots and add a bunch of years together, and you get really large samples, so I had a lot of different racial and ethnic groups that I could separate out.
And I assume you’re using the standard definition of food insecurity?
Yes, it's based on a 10-item module from the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture). And I limited the study to just a lower-income sample. I didn't look at the entire cross-section of the United States. I looked at folks who were 200% of the federal poverty line or lower and then I separated them out within that to look at people who were in really difficult economic circumstances, people who were in sort of moderate economic strain, and then people who were at the higher end of this lower-income sample.
What were some of the demographic differences that jumped out at you? I understand you found that the Asian American sample was higher in terms of food security, correct?
Yes. And it varied even among Asian Americans by poverty classifications. I was able to put people into three groups. Severe poverty is what I called 50% or lower of the federal poverty line. And then the moderate poor was 50% to 100% of the federal poverty line, and the near poor were 100% to 200% of the federal poverty line. Even within Asian Americans, the severely poor Asian Americans were actually significantly more food secure than Asian Americans in that moderate poverty category. That was one of the things that really jumped out in the findings.
The other thing that jumped out was if you compare it across groups, For example, in the severe poor group, roughly 90% of Asian Americans were food secure. And it was about 67% for native American Alaskan natives. So, a huge difference between racial and ethnic groups when you drill down into some of the categories of economic disadvantage.
Were there any other groups that you were surprised by?
In the broader literature on food insecurity, there has been research for some time about racial and ethnic differences. And a lot of the racial and ethnic differences compare whites and Hispanics and whites and Blacks. In this particular lower-income sample, I found that whites and Hispanics were actually more similar in terms of their probability of being food secure or food insecure than what's typically reported.
Blacks were less secure?
Yes, Blacks were a lot more often less food secure. But there was more similarity between Blacks and whites as well in some of the specific categories. Not as much as the Hispanic/white similarity, but more similarity there than what is typically reported.
And did you find in any of the other groups this phenomenon that you were describing with Asian Americans where the poorest were actually more secure than some of the other income groups?
That was a unique ethnicity from that perspective, and it was interesting to see. From an economic perspective, we should see a gradation, right? The more economic resources you have, the more food security. And so, there's this expectation that that's what we would see among all groups. We certainly didn't see it among Asian Americans and in some of the other groups, there was really very little difference at times. In a lot of cases, the results didn’t provide support for that purely economic argument that it's just how many resources do you have that determines your level of food security.
I guess you would also presume that the less income you have, the more government help you're having, but that argument wouldn't apply if you're having this outlier with Asian Americans because they're as eligible as anybody else.
Yes, exactly. And that gets at the point that I try to make in the paper, that we know that groups don't use government resources equally. They may not be aware or have the resources to access government resources. For example, the SNAP program— it’s not a straightforward process to go through to get qualified and receive food stamps. It's hard to navigate the system. Some of the sort of nuance that I'm describing in the paper is probably a product of people having differing rates of awareness and availability to access these types of resources. But I've done some other work, as have other researchers, that has suggested that there's likely some really unique strategies that groups and communities are employing to try and maintain food security in really trying times. We don't understand those very well and we need to. Some of these groups are maintaining relatively high rates of food security in situations where we wouldn't expect them. And if we can understand what sorts of strategies are being employed or what kind of conditions are leading to that, we might get closer to understanding this problem, or maybe eradicating it.
And have you done any previous work or have others that would offer any guesses as to what's going on in the Asian American community that might be the cause of this?
There's not a lot of work that drills down into specific groups like that. And I think there needs to be. We have some ideas about what could be happening. For example, I have done work that's shown that for some groups, the feeling of cohesiveness that they have in the neighborhood of residents really matters for their food security.
The other things that come to mind are there may be some really unique and interesting labor force participation things going on. For example, maybe some lower-income groups are just more likely to work in the agricultural sector and so they gain access to food just through their jobs.
In terms of lessons for policy makers—other than getting more information, which it sounds like is a big thing coming out of this—is there anything else in particular you think this work suggests?
I don't want to presume that I have any sort of magic bullet. But I think the point that this work and, and work like it, is trying to get across is this is a really complicated issue. Government aid and government programs are really, really important. They're not reaching people equally. And they're also not sometimes the primary resource that people are depending upon to help them with the situation that they're facing. And so, again, it's worth understanding that there are people who are struggling mightily and there are strategies that they're employing that are successful. That's really important to get a handle on. I think the evidence, not just in food security, but in health disparities and a variety of different areas suggests that we just really need to be adaptive and understand what's going on in communities so that we can provide the best and most efficient help to lift those people up.