2014 Conference

This research investigates how households in metro and non-metro areas coped with food hardships during the Great Recession by building on two studies. The first (Guo, 2012) found that non-metro households had a higher probability of receiving assistance from a nonprofit, friend, or family member in response to material hardship. Unfortunately, food insecurity was not one of the hardships investigated by Guo. The second (Sabia and Nielsen, 2013) found that residents of non-metro areas were more likely to experience food insecurity. However, that work identified the hardship, not the source of any assistance received. Neither used data that span the Great Recession. In response, we investigated the receipt of both government and informal food assistance among metro and non-metro households in 2005 and 2010. Consistent with Guo, our preliminary results suggest that despite similar levels of food security a higher proportion of non-metro households received both government and informal food assistance. This suggests that metro households may be underserved by food assistance programs relative to those in non-metro areas. The results also suggests that this gap may have widened between 2005 and 2010, making the forthcoming 2004-2011 multi-year fixed effects model of great interest.