MINNEAPOLIS - We would all like to live in a world where nobody knows what it's like to be hungry.
But we don't.
And in Minnesota, new numbers show more people are using food shelves.
Minnesotans visited food shelves 3,402,077 times in 2017 - the highest number of visits in recorded history, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Human Services that was analyzed by Hunger Solutions.
Hunger Solutions serves 87 counties across the state.
Sophia Lenarz-Coy, Hunger Solutions Associate Director, said the number of visits by seniors was 308,609. That's up 39.3 percent from 2012.
Seniors are classified as adults over the age of 65.
"There were over 3.4 million visits in 2017 to food shelves in the state of Minnesota. We have been over the 3 million now for the past seven years, but this year's data is higher than any data that we have recorded," she said. "If food shelves were open 24/7, six people would visit a food shelf in the state of Minnesota every minute."
Lenarz-Coy said food shelf visits rose along with the unemployment rate during the recession.
"It is the new normal and that is what concerns us the most at Hunger Solutions," she said. "Food shelves expanded their capacity dramatically when the recession hit. Considering that unemployment rates are some of the lowest they have been, Minnesota is relatively prosperous by a lot of indicators, but what we are seeing is food shelf usage is just not going down."