My prior post on hunger in the United States attracted some comments in the blogosphere regarding what presidential candidate John Edwards has been saying about the issue.

Candidate Edwards has been claiming that 35 million Americans are going hungry. For example, in recent Thanksgiving comments he said: “More than 35 million Americans went hungry last year.”

That is not true. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is the official source for such statistics. Here is what the agency says:

“USDA does not have a measure of hunger or the number of hungry people. Prior to 2006, USDA described households with very low food security as ‘food insecure with hunger,’ and characterized them as households in which one or more people were hungry at times during the year because they could not afford enough food … In 2006, USDA introduced the new description “very low food security” to replace “food insecurity with hunger.”

O.K., well how big is the group called “very low food security?” If you look at the chart here, you see it is at most about 3% of the population (about 9 million people), or those with an episode of “very low food security” even a single time during a year.

In sum, this appears to be a good topic for a Washington Post’s Pinocchio analysis.