“Children of the Poor” in a highly useful and dry-as-dust publication called the Social Security Bulletin.

Orshansky’s idea was to define a poverty line based on the cost of a healthy diet.

Her previous job had been at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she had worked in an agency called the

Bureau of Home Economics and Human Nutrition. One task of this bureau had been to calculate how much it

would cost to feed a nutritionally adequate diet to a family. Orshansky found that the average family spent one-

third of its income on food. She then proposed that the poverty line be the amount one requires to buy a

nutritionally adequate diet, given the size of the family, multiplied by three.

The current U.S. poverty line is essentially the same as the Orshansky poverty line, although the government

adjusts the dollar amounts to represent the same buying power over time. The U.S. poverty line in 2021 ranged
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