In Tennessee, between 2019-2021:
- Food insecurity in Tennessee averaged 11.20%.
- Tennessee’s food insecurity rate was 7% higher than the national average of 10.4%.
- The official poverty rate (which does not account for income from safety-net and tax-support programs such as SNAP, EITC, and others) in the state averaged 12.2%.
- But using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (which does include safety-net and tax-support income), the poverty rate falls to 9.1%. In other words, these programs reduced the poverty rate in Tennessee by 25% and the number of people living in poverty by 214,000.
- SNAP, alone, lifted 167,000 people above the poverty line in Tennessee, including 68,000 children, per year between 2013 and 2017, on average.
