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Hunger and Undernutrition in the United States^1,2,

Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155

In the United States, where food is plentiful nationwide, detection of populations at risk of hunger and malnutrition must rely more on social and economic indicators than on physiological indices, important as these are. Large federal programs expanded or created after the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health were shown to be successful during the 1970s in reducing hunger and malnutrition as a massive social phenomenon, even though poverty conditions remained the same. Studies that apply our knowledge of nutritional and dietary requirements to construct a "market basket" of inexpensive, commonly used foods that meet the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) and that set estimated minimum incomes as a multiple of the cost of such an "RDA-based market basket" plus the costs of other necessities would identify populations and families at risk and permit better targeting of food programs.

KEY WORDS: • hunger • malnutrition • social indices • economic indices • federal food programs • minimum income • White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health

¹ Presented as part of the "Symposium on the Identification and Prevalence of Undernutrition in the United States" during the joint meeting of the American Institute of Nutrition and the American Society for Clinical Nutrition held in conjunction with the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, New Orleans, LA, March 20, 1989. Supported in part by cooperative agreement HPU 880004-02-1 with the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Public Health Service, Department of Health and Human Services.

² Guest editors for this symposium were William H. Dietz, New England Medical Center, Boston, MA, and Frederick L. Trowbridge, Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA.

Manuscript received 6 December 1989. Revision accepted 6 April 1990.