This Thursday in downtown Tampa, America's Second Harvest of Tampa Bay is staging its 15th annual Empty Bowls Thanksgiving Luncheon in Lykes Gaslight Square.  Last year's event raised more than $50,000 for the organization's food bank and Kids Cafe Programs.

It's always around the holidays when the issue of the less fortunate get more play in the media, but so should statistics unveiled yesterday by the Department of Agriculture, who announced  that the number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million.  That's the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack attributed the rise to the unemployment rate in the U.S., at its highest levels since the early 1980's.

The Wall Street Journal does report one caveat that might make the news less depressing:

But the way USDA economists measure food worries in the U.S. is far more liberal than their gauge for other nations, where people are labeled food insecure only if they consume fewer than 2,100 calories a day. Few of the U.S. households labeled as food insecure by the USDA have it that tough.

Instead, the USDA's domestic survey tries to quantify the number of households that have difficulty providing enough food at some time during the year. Many of these families are able to avoid hunger by participating in such federal nutrition programs as food stamps, or by having their children participate in a free school-lunch program.

With the economy continuing to founder (Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday that "Some important headwinds-in particular constrained bank lending and a weak job market-likely will prevent the expansion from being as robust as we would hope") some of President Obama's allies intend to call him out today on the weak job market.

The NY Times reports that the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza will be amongst some of the groups calling on the President to do more to create jobs.

They will call for increased spending for schools and roads, billions of dollars in fiscal relief to state and local governments to forestall more layoffs and a direct government jobs program, “especially in distressed communities facing severe unemployment.”

This is just more incentive for the President to hope that the Senate can get their act together and try to begin debating a health care bill soon – Obama's poll numbers remain solid ( a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released today shows him with a 56% approval rating), but he has got to start focusing in "like a laser beam" as the saying goes, or else those poll numbers will go south in a hurry.

This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2009.