Nobody is starving in the United States, unless they’re being held captive in a pit in someone’s basement in some weird “Silence of the Lambs” scenario. One of, if not the biggest, health problems facing the American poor is obesity, and no, I’m not buying the old line about decent food being too expensive. Some of the most affordable groceries one can buy include bulk rice, beans, and lean turkey, which can make for some pretty healthful meals. I’m not buying the canard about poor people not having time to cook, either, because they are working nine jobs just to get by. Anyone with that kind of gumption won’t be below the poverty line for long, for one thing.

That hasn’t stopped Axios from proclaiming, in a recent article, that more and more American adults are going hungry. The problem is, as an editorial at Issues & Insights points out, it just isn’t true.

A headline in Axios over the weekend carried this scary warning: “An increasing share of American adults are going hungry.”

The “shocking data point” comes, the story says, “at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Donald Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits.”

But take a look at the chart Axios published in that tear-jerking story, which is based on data from Morning Consult. Notice anything?

Here’s the chart:

Look at the years. pic.twitter.com/rcJpQRRYT9

— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) July 11, 2025

As I&I points out:

Morning Consult started tracking “food insecurity” in 2021. And, sure enough, it was on the rise – the entire time Joe Biden was president.

Look at what has happened since Trump has been in office. It’s back down to where it was nearly two years ago and appears to be moving sideways.

Let’s also point out that this is just polling data. There’s nothing in any of this that is traced to actual, reproducible work on health care trends. This “data” is pure fluff and fuzz. There’s nothing in there about increased (or decreased) data on any health issues attributed to malnutrition. There’s nothing about the increasing cases of any of the various syndromes that can come about due to hunger. And Axios still manages to get it wrong!

Obesity, on the other hand, is a serious and growing concern among America’s poor.

Back to the fluff and fuzz:

Food insecurity was high for most of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, went steadily in Trump’s first term, then spiked under Biden. (Interestingly, food stamp enrollment also went up under Obama, came down under Trump, then rose again under Biden.)

Could this be because the Obama and Biden administrations kept up a non-stop drumbeat about hunger in America? During the Obama administration, the Department of Agriculture was actually advertising the food stamp program on television and radio, pushing it as a food security measure.

Meanwhile, fraud and waste in that system were endemic. We’ve all heard the stories of people paying for carts full of sugary snacks and premium meats with their SNAP benefits, but sometimes that fraud has been on an industrial scale.