In September 1997, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released the government’s first national data on the prevalence of hunger and food insecurity in the United States. The data resulted from a questionnaire developed jointly by the U.S. Census Bureau, USDA’s Food and Consumer Service, and the CDC’s National Center on Health Statistics and administered by Census Bureau interviewers in 1995.

Based on answers to 18 key questions, USDA characterized households as "food secure," "food insecure without hunger," "food insecure with moderate hunger," or "food insecure with severe hunger." USDA looked only at food insecurity and hunger related to financial constraints, i.e. lack of money to buy food. The study defined the terms as follows:

Food Security: assured access to enough food for an active healthy life.

Food Insecurity: limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and sufficient foods.

Hunger: uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food due to lack of resources to obtain food.

According to USDA, "Food security is an important dimension of household well-being, analogous to health or housing. Food insecurity and hunger are undesirable in their own right, and possible precursors to nutritional, health, and developmental problems." The study classified households into the following categories:

Food Secure: Households with no or minimal evidence of food insecurity

Food Insecure Without Hunger: Households, experiencing uncertain access to sufficient food, concerned about inadequate resources to buy enough food, and who have adjusted by decreasing the quality of food their family eats. These families are often at risk of hunger.

Food Insecure with Moderate Hunger: Households in which adults have decreased the quantity as well as quality of food they consume (because of lack of money) to the point where they show clear evidence of a repeated pattern of hunger. There also may be hungry children in some but not necessarily all of these households. This category includes households who have indicated that due to constrained resources their children were not eating enough and that they had, at times, been forced to cut the size of their children’s meals in order to make ends meet.

Food Insecure with Severe Hunger: Households in which children’s intake has been reduced even further and there are hungry children due to lack of financial resources; and adults’ food intake is severely reduced.

Based on the report, Household Food Security in the United States in 1995, the overall prevalence of food insecurity among U.S. households, including all three levels of severity, is 11.9% or 11.94 million households. (There are approximately 100 million households in the U.S.) This number is comprised of 7.8 million households that are food insecure without hunger, 3.3 million with moderate hunger and 820,000 with severe hunger. In California, the overall prevalence of food insecurity was found to be 14.4%, or over 1.6 million households. Of these households, 1.1 million are food insecure without hunger, 433,000 face moderate hunger, and 114,000 experience severe hunger.

While the interviews were conducted with households, it is possible to estimate numbers of people in each category. All three categories of food insecure households would add up to over 34 million persons–consisting of 23.5 million food insecure without hunger, 9.2 million food insecure with moderate hunger and 2 million food insecure with severe hunger. USDA points out in its report that these estimates are not directly comparable to any other prevalence estimates developed in the past because of the "differences in measures, samples and measurement approaches used in the studies." However, USDA also notes that, when all these differences are taken into account, past estimates are more similar to those developed by USDA than might be expected.

Many of the children living in households classified as experiencing moderate hunger or severe hunger are actually hungry. In order to include all of these children, childhood hunger estimates use the total number of families with children in food insecure households that were classified with either moderate or severe hunger. Approximately 6.1 % of all U.S. households with children suffer severe or moderate hunger (4.2 million children live in these households); and an additional 12.3 % of households are considered to live with food insecurity — on the edge of hunger. The rates of hunger are more than doubled for low-income (incomes less than 130% of the poverty line) families with children: 15% these households experience moderate or severe hunger (3.2 million children live in these households).

The USDA Food Security Measure is the first official, nationally recognized hunger measure. That the numbers are high, even before the advent of welfare reform, is of great concern. The survey provides a means for tracking the prevalence of hunger from year to year for the first time. Food Security data from CPS surveys done in 1996 and 1997 will be made available soon.