I think I know what Shagnasty means, though he doesn’t say it well.
If you had 4 food banks, 3 of which had no supplies whatsoever, and 1 of which could serve every single one of 1,000 hungry people in the city, you could end up with some interesting numbers.
If everybody goes randomly to the nearest food bank, you get the figure that you have 1,000 food requests, of which 25% are filled, and 750 “hungry people.” You have a perceived shortage, when what you actually have is a distribution problem.
If an empty food bank re-directs someone to a different random food bank, you get more total food requests than you have people, because some requests from the same person are counted twice.
I don’t like the language change at all, but I think they’re right: counting “hungry people,” especially with a population that is largely homeless, illegal, and/or poor, isn’t as easy as counting up all the people in line at the soup kitchen once a week.
This also captures the (potentially large) number of people who get enough to eat every day, but only after doing the rounds of various charities that may have something available. Going to bed every day not knowing if you are going to get a meal tomorrow is not as bad as actually starving, but it’s certainly not a good situation.
I agree with the USDA on this, and other posters have raised good points in their favor. One final reason is emotional: this, as with many issues, is not something you ought to get excited about. The government is trying to measure certain specific problems in a certain way. In order to do this properly, they need to appraise the situation in a calm and focused manner.
I don’t know. The word “hungry” seems more like newspeak to me. Hungry is inexact and differs from person to person. The only problem with “food scarcity” is that it is a bit unwieldy.
Except that, as several people have pointed out, “food scarcity” is not the new term, nor does it appear anywhere in the article. It’s “food insecurity” and I’d like to know how it’s any easier to measure this than “hunger”.
It isn’t necessary to assume the distribution is that incompetent; that was for purposes of illustration. No matter what your projected distribution is, you’re not going to be able to forecast where the food needs to be with 100% precision. You also won’t be able to track individual requests by a specific hungry person so his requests are only counted once, even though he visits different food banks.
As to what it solves, I have to say it solves the homeless/hungry problem exactly as well as the present system, which is to say, not. But it doesn’t make the problem worse by purporting to count people when it cannot possibly do so.