You seem to be focussing on the correlation between poverty and obesity. That's well known, but there are a couple of key differences from the discussion at hand:
First, the poorest category is generally quite broad. I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket. The fact that obesity is more prevalent overall in that bracket doesn't mean that everyone in it gets enough to eat.
Secondly, getting the food you need isn't just about calorie intake. After all, a cup of vegetable oil has almost all the calories you need for a day. People need a balanced diet, including vitamins and protein and so on. So waistline measurements alone aren't enough to determine how many people aren't getting adequate food. News stories such as tinyurl.com/cqw7r43 suggest that poorer households are cutting back on fruit and veg as money gets tighter.
Finally, when people can't afford enough food, they are likely to turn to unconventional sources like foodbanks and dumpster diving. That people need to rely on charity and scavenging is a failure of society. We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a problem getting enough food.
That's actually very likely the right thing to do. Thanks to various wealth transfer programs, anyone with earned income <$20k has consumption of approximately $20k.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt
We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a problem getting enough food.
Are people even becoming slightly less fat? That will happen long before anyone starves.
Have you considered how easy it is to stuff yourself with simple carbohydrates? Do you
For example, someone I knew in high school (a number of years ago now) qualified for the school lunch program, so nominally his family was poor. But they lived in a house, with a yard; had cable TV, computers, and Internet. I would say they're working-class, or maybe even lower middle-class.
If the lowest-income 20% of the population is labeled as poor for the purposes of this statistic ("nominal poor"), but the number of people who are so poor their children are starving in the streets ("desperately poor") is 0.20% of the population, then it's not so surprising that statistics over the nominal poor much more closely resemble the general population than the picture of the desperately poor.
Not sure whether 4x should qualify as "rich", but more importantly, being underweight is pretty low bar. For example, I am underweight.
The actual number as reported by USDA is 1%. The keyword to look for is "very low food security", formerly known as "food insecurity with hunger", which is the lowest range of food security measured by USDA. (The second lowest range, "low food security", formerly "food security without hunger", means poor diet but no reduction in food intake. Note that even among the "very low food security" households less than half reported "lost weight" and less than a third reported "did not eat the whole day".)
One interesting observation: "Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days in each of those months." I'll go out on a limb and hypothesize that these few days are the last few days of each month. So one thing to try to reduce that number would be making welfare payments daily, instead of monthly. (I read that welfare these is delivered electronically, you carry a special card which looks like a credit card and a certain amount appears on it the first day of each month. So it shouldn't add any overhead to switch to daily installments.)
Sources:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo... for the definition of food insecurity levels.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r... for the 1% number.
In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.
This does not mean people aren't getting enough to eat. The human body responds in very predictable ways to food consumption - do waistline measurements suggest anyone is lacking food?