The AFP wire service has taken up the Associated Press’s habit of using loaded terminology in supposedly objective news reports. Check out this lede:

“The US government has tweaked its terminology in referring to the nearly 11 million Americans who face a constant struggle with hunger to refer to them as people with ‘very low food security.’”

The decision was a judgment about whether those people truly “face a constant struggle with hunger,” and how well the existing measures determined that. Rather than treating it as a controversy the journalist simply states the government is wrong.

No mention until the seventh — and last — paragraph that the change was due to a recommendation of the National Academies of Science. If anything, the organization leans left.

The funniest thing is that the NAS said (all italics theirs):

“The panel therefore concludes that hunger is a concept distinct from food insecurity, which is an indicator of and possible consequence of food insecurity, that can be useful in characterizing severity of food insecurity. Hunger itself is an important concept that should be measured at the individual level distinct from, but in the context of, food insecurity.”

Also:

“As an indication of the severity of food insecurity, the HFSSM asks the household respondent if in the past 12 months she or he has experienced being hungry because of lack of food due to resource constraints. This is not the same as evaluating individual members of the household in a survey as to whether or not they have experienced hunger. The panel urges USDA to consider alternate labels to convey the severity of food insecurity without the problems inherent in the current labels.“

The issue is whether or not the survey used measures hunger. It doesn’t. It measures household-level resource problems. None of this has anything to do with whitewashing the problem.

It makes me wonder if the USDA will keep measuring hunger, but with a different survey (as the NAS panel also recommended).

On a side note hunger, in reality, is a practically non-existent problem in America. In fact, the poor are disproportionately overweight. As Rich Lowry once argued:

“Hunger, defined as going without a meal at least once in the past month, is also extremely rare, according to the Department of Agriculture, affecting roughly one-half of 1 percent of American children. Advocacy groups get their higher number by resorting to a category in Agriculture Department surveys measuring ‘food insecurity without hunger,’ meaning the worry that it might be hard to find a meal.”

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.