Iowa food banks distributed 10 BILLION pounds of food in past year

This is National Hunger Awareness Day and a study from the non-partisan Iowa Fiscal Partnership says one in every 11 Iowans is “food insecure.” The report found more than nine-percent of Iowans lack access to sufficient food, while three-percent were hungry, a recurrent lack of access to food that could lead to malnutrition. Colleen Moriarty, spokeswoman for Hunger Solutions, says people in rural areas feel the hunger pinch as much as in big cities.”Food shelves are one of the first places that see the economy when it goes into a downturn and one of the last places that you see evidence of the economy picking up,” she says. The study found more than 100,000 Iowa children and another 100,000 Iowa adults get government food assistance each year, while non-profit food banks serving Iowans distributed over ten-MILLION pounds of food in the past year. Moriarty says many people who use food banks are -not- homeless. “Food (pantries) are primarily visited by the working poor, people who are cobbling together two or three jobs, people who have seen tremendous increases in the cost of housing, the cost of health care, the cost of transportation,” she says. The full report is available online at “www.iowafiscal.org”.