In fact, 35.1 million Americans lived in “food insecure” households in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Food insecurity is defined as the inability to buy enough food to meet basic nutritional needs at some time in the previous 12 months. That represents approximately one of every eight Americans – with children and the elderly increasingly affected.

Those 35.1 million people include more than 12 million children – nearly 17 percent of the nation’s total. Almost 11 million live in “very low food security” households, meaning at least one member of the household went hungry at some point because they couldn’t afford enough food.

To learn more about who America’s hungry are, read Hunger in America 2006, a study by America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest hunger-relief charitable organization.

In a nation as prosperous as the United States, it’s as heartbreaking as it is shocking that almost one of every four people in line at a soup kitchen is a child; more than a fifth of them pre-schoolers.

Yet, according to America’s Second Harvest –The Nation’s Food Bank Network, America’s largest network of emergency food providers, of the estimated 26 million who relied on network food banks, soup kitchens or shelters for at least some of their food in 2005, almost 9.5 million were age 17 or younger. Two million had yet to turn 6.

As millions carelessly throw away leftovers or a food they “don’t like,” millions more live in households where children are deprived of a meal because of lack of food or money to buy food. Even when these circumstances are temporary, the effects can be long-term and damaging on children whose physical or mental development may suffer as the result of improper nutrition.

Hunger is a national problem but it has been on the rise as a local issue as well. Unfortunately, many individuals that are at risk of hunger are in the local communities, both urban and suburban, that you reside in.

In the last decade, hunger-relief agencies have found that the greatest increase in hungry Americans has been among the working poor. Despite the strong economy and their own hard work, they cannot always make ends meet. And increasingly, they are turning to charities, local soup kitchens, food pantries, and emergency shelters for hunger relief. Over the past two decades, the poverty rate among working families has increased by nearly 50 percent and in the United States alone, 14,812,000 people have become members of working poor families. Unfortunately more frequently than you would expect, people find themselves resorting to emergency food assistance programs to meet the nutritional needs of their families. Surprisingly, of these emergency food recipient households, at least one person is working and 49% are those employed are working full-time -- 40 hours or more per week.