What Does Increasing Severity of Food Insecurity Indicate for Food Insecure Families? Relationships Between Severity of Food Insecurity and Indicators of Material Hardship and Constrained Food Purchasing

Abstract

Understanding how increasing severity of food insecurity relates to other measures of material hardship and food purchasing is important for understanding the experience and its associated consequences. Data from a study of 501 low-income families in Toronto, which included food security measured by the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) and questions about material hardships and food purchasing constraint, were used to examine how odds of experiencing hardships were related to severity of food insecurity. Differences between fully food secure families and marginally food insecure families were also examined. The odds of experiencing rent and bill hardships, giving up services, pawning possessions, and constrained purchasing of milk, vegetables, and fruit increased along the continuum of severity of food insecurity. In comparison to fully food secure families, marginally food insecure families had significantly higher odds of experiencing bill and rent hardships and having given up household services. The increasing burden of other hardships with greater severity highlights the increasing vulnerability of household circumstances, which has implications for understanding consequences of food insecurity and interventions aimed at ameliorating its effects. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition to view the free supplemental file: supplemental Fig. 1.]