USDA conquers hunger.

[Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks] - The U.S. government is no longer referring to poor people going hungry. Hunger in America, in other words, has disappeared. It’s been made inapplicable. Irrelevant. Improper. Non-existent. In its place, there’s food security. This is not a joke. This is the new policy of the United States Department of Agriculture, and it was reported in this morning’s Washington Post: “Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans’ access to food, and it has consistently used the word ‘hunger’ to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year. Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said ‘hungry’ is ‘not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey.’ Nord, a USDA sociologist, said, ‘We don’t have a measure of that condition.’ The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans—35 million people—could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined ‘very low food security’ to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group.”