But having difficulty purchasing food isn't quite the same as going hungry, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture makes apparent in its annual Report on Household Food Security.

First, the big picture: hunger rates jumped after the recession, and have yet to come down. In 2012, 14.5 percent of households suffered from some form of food "insecurity," which essentially means they had to worry about putting dinner on the table, might not have been able to afford a balanced diet, but weren't necessarily skimping on meals. The upshot: almost 49 million adults and children couldn't always count on where their next bite was coming from.

Thankfully, a much smaller subset of those people actually experienced serious hunger. According to the USDA, only 5.7 percent of households dealt with "very low food security" at some point during the year, which means someone in the home was actually skipping meals or cutting portion sizes. In total, some 17 million Americans, including 8.2 million children, lived in those homes.

Wait, are there really 8.2 million hungry children in this country? That's basically the population of New York City.

Well, it's not quite that bad. In most of these households, parents choose to skip meals instead of their children. (To be clear, when I say, not "that bad," I'm speaking very relatively. Of course nobody should have to forgo dinner so their kid can eat.). Ultimately, kids went hungry in just 1.2 percent U.S. homes last year. That comes out to 977,000 Americans under 18. Which is still pretty heart wrenching, if you think about it—it'd still be enough hungry kids to fill a city the size of San Jose. But at least it's not millions.

So are these families starving every day?

Thankfully no. The USDA asks households if they've experienced hunger or had trouble affording food any time in the past year or past month. And as shown below, it estimates that just 1.1 percent of households on a given day are probably dealing with true hunger.

That said, the hungriest households do cope with these problems repeatedly throughout the year. As USDA notes: "Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days each of those months."

Is the problem just as bad all over the U.S.?

Just like poverty, there's an enormous amount of geographic variation when it comes to hunger in the U.S. As this map from the Hamilton Project shows (click for an interactive version), child food insecurity is worst through the Sun Belt and West Coast. It's much less severe in parts of the Midwest and Northeast.

Overall, the state with the worst hunger problem (judging by how many households suffer from "very low food security") appears to be Arizona, though Missouri comes close. (Remember Winter's Bone? Apparently it wasn't exaggerating.)