USDA: Hungry children rose 50 percent in 2007 in US
New government figures show that almost 700,000 children went hungry in the US at some point in 2007.
That number was up more than 50 percent from the year before and reached its highest point since 1998.
The Agriculture Department's annual survey of food security, released Monday, also shows that more than 36 million adults and children struggled against hunger last year. That's up by 700,000 since 2006. These are people who either didn't have enough money for food or access to enough food aid to maintain active healthy lives.
Almost a third of these people, or nearly 12 million, had what the government calls "very low food security." That means they had a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat.