It turns out that while Portland was becoming the coolest city for food, not everybody was eating.
And while we’ve been advancing course by course, some of our tables were heading in the wrong direction.
The eagerly awaited annual U.S. Department of Agriculture hunger survey reports — the malnutrition version of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue — came out this month. And just as in the college football rankings, Oregon is not where it should be. At a time when Oregon was supposed to be gaining in its battle with hunger, the feds reported that their surveys from 2012 to 2014 found that Oregon’s food insecurity got worse at the third fastest rate in the country.
From their survey, the three-year average of Oregonians reporting food insecurity — essentially, not always knowing where your next meal is coming from — rose from 13.6 percent to 16.1 percent, an increase of 2.5 percentage points; that’s more than any state except Louisiana and Mississippi.
By David Sarasohn, The Oregonian