“You need to come say grace before dinner,” Patricia Washington announces, removing a sizzling frozen pizza from the microwave. “It’s hot,” she warns her grandchildren, four-year-old Mia and one-year-old Jayden. With everyone situated, Patricia begins the dinner prayer. “God is great, and God is good,” she says in a soft voice. Mia repeats each line after her. “And we thank Him for our food. By His hand we must be fed. Give us, Lord, our daily bread.



The kids tear off chewy chunks of pizza. Patricia hasn’t taken any for herself. She makes sure the kids eat first, if she eats at all. Patricia’s daughter, Saundra, the children’s mother, usually joins them for dinner. But she is still out job hunting. An episode of Family Feud plays on the outdated television set.

It’s a familiar scene, except that Patricia and the kids aren’t at a kitchen table, or even in a kitchen. They are crowded into the hotel room where they’ve been living since they were evicted from their home four months ago. They eat dinner sitting on one of two full-sized beds.

What if we reframed the way we think of food: not as a privilege but as a fundamental human right?

Across town in a leafy suburb, Greely Janson sits down at the dinner table with her husband, Matt, and their daughter, Adelle. Tonight they are eating chicken soup made from an organic chicken that Greely roasted. Greely cooks from scratch most nights, using mostly organic ingredients, sourced from local farms that use sustainable farming practices.

Over a five-year period beginning in 2012, we interviewed and spent time with more than 150 black, white, and Latinx families from North Carolina, documenting stark differences in the diets of American families. All the mothers and grandmothers in our study wanted their children to thrive, to be as healthy and happy as possible. But the food on their tables varied dramatically.

The families in our study aren’t unique. The gap in the quality of rich and poor Americans’ diets has grown over the past two decades; the diets of middle-class and wealthy Americans have improved while the diets of poor Americans have not. Researchers attribute this gap to the high cost of healthy foods. And many people in the United States don’t have more money to spend on food.

Poor families in the US spend about $3,767 a year on food, compared with $12,350 for the wealthiest households. Low-income families cut costs wherever they can, spending less money at restaurants and doing more cooking at home than the affluent. Despite these efforts, the rich spend just under a tenth of their income on food, whereas poor people spend a full third of their income on food. And still, it’s not enough.

One out of every eight American households, like the Washingtons, is “food insecure”, meaning they do not have enough to eat. And the situation hasn’t improved in 20 years.

What if we reframed the way we think of food: not as a privilege but as a fundamental human right, guaranteed to everyone?

Americans believe in other basic human rights, like the right to education, the right to free speech, and the right to representation. But we don’t see food as a basic human right. Instead, politicians debate whether food stamps should be available to people who are unemployed or have a criminal record, or what kinds of food people should be allowed to buy with their food stamps. But food is a vital human need, and it is essential to “the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness” that Americans hold so dear.



If we want a healthy and thriving nation, we need to ensure that everyone has enough to eat. This effort starts with expanding existing programs that help hungry families. Food stamps should be made available to more people, not fewer. We also need to invest in universal food programs in schools. As other countries have done for decades, American schools – from New York City to Huntington, West Virginia –are seeing the economic, health and social benefits of providing free school breakfast and lunch to every child.



Making food a human right also requires tackling the underlying conditions that cause poverty and food insecurity. We need to raise the minimum wage, so that working families can afford to eat. And we need to invest in affordable housing, so that people aren’t forced to decide between paying their rent or buying groceries.



During the five years we spent with the Washingtons, the family experienced two periods of homelessness, and food was often scarce. We interviewed Mia Washington a few years after we met her, near her seventh birthday. She was worried about having enough food to eat and how hard it was for her family to get food. Mia often didn’t feel full after she ate dinner. We asked: “If you aren’t full, what do you do?”

“I watch TV,” she replied simply.



Mia Washington’s situation isn’t unusual.

What happens in families may feel private and personal, but the fact that many American children and families don’t have enough food is a public issue – one that demands collective solutions.