PORTLAND - A new study on hunger in Oregon released Tuesday shows that many working households can't afford enough food, challenging earlier assumptions that hunger was confined mostly to the unemployed.

Oregon State University researchers found that full-time, year-round Oregon workers are more than twice as likely to go hungry compared to their national counterparts.

"The big surprise was that groups that tend not to be hungry in the rest of the country do tend to be hungry here," said report co-author Mark Edwards, associate professor of sociology.

Edwards and Bruce Weber, a professor of agricultural and resource economics, drew on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 1999 and 2001 Current Population Surveys for their report "Food Insecurity and Hunger in Oregon: A New Look."

The census surveys asked 50,000 adults across the nation - including more than 750 in Oregon - whether they or their children repeatedly ate smaller portions than desired or skipped meals because they didn't have money for food.

The forms asked respondents whether they ever worried that groceries would last, lost weight because they could not afford food, or bought low-cost, less healthy foods to feed their children.

Nationwide, 3.1 percent of adults said they had gone hungry or worried that they could go hungry because of lack of money. In Oregon, the rate was 5.2 percent.

Some results were expected, Edwards said. Manual laborers and part-time workers reported higher hunger rates than other groups.

Both men and women in these categories were more than twice as likely to be in hungry households, due to lower wages and more irregular working schedules, the study showed.

But researchers were surprised to note higher hunger rates in groups that are typically less susceptible. Two-parent families reported a 7.3 percent hunger rate, compared to 2 percent in other states for the same category.

And the study found significantly higher rates of food insecurity among households with one or two full-time working adults. Those groups had a hunger rate of 5.5 percent, compared to the national average of 2 percent.

"Whatever stereotypical views we had about who is hungry are not well-founded in Oregon," Edwards said. "Hunger might be kind of invisible to us, because it's happening among people who are doing the things we ask them to do."

Next, the researchers plan to examine how rent, child care, health care and other costs relate to hunger rates, he said. They hope to complete the study, based on the 2000 Oregon Population Survey, early next year.

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