BY ALFRED LUBRANO

America is hungry and getting hungrier, with 49 million people - 17 million of them children - last year unable to consistently get enough food to eat, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

These figures represent 14.6 percent of all households, a 3.5-percentage-point jump over 2007, and they are the largest recorded since the agency began measuring hunger in 1995.

Of those 49 million, 12 million adults and 5.2 million children reported experiencing the country's most severe hunger, possibly going days without eating. Among the children, nearly half a million in the developmentally critical years under age 6 were going hungry. That's three times the number in 2006.

The study documented both "low food security," which describes people unable to consistently get enough to eat, and "very low food security," in which people reported being hungry various times over the year but were unable to eat because there wasn't enough money for food.

The South reported the highest number of households in both categories, at 15.9 percent, followed by the West at 14.5 percent, the Midwest at 14 percent, and the Northeast at 12.8 percent.

Experts attributed the harsh statistics to the recent recession and to an American poverty that has persisted despite economic growth earlier in the decade.

In a statement yesterday, President Obama called the report "unsettling," adding: "Our children's ability to grow, learn, and meet their full potential - and therefore our future competitiveness as a nation - depends on regular access to healthy meals."

Referring to the increasing numbers of children who suffered the most from hunger, Philadelphia hunger expert Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University public-health professor, said: "This is a catastrophe. This is not a blip. This recession will be in the bodies of our children."

The report confirmed difficulties that antihunger experts already knew - and then went beyond them, according to Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit in Washington working to eradicate hunger.

"This report was worse even than the expectation," he said.

Weill explained that the economic growth of the early 2000s "simply wasn't getting to people in the lower third of the economy."

When the recession hit, it accelerated the pain.

"What you really had was a lot of poor people in the last decade getting closer to the cliff, and now we see the recession has just pushed them off," Weill said.

Carey Morgan, who runs the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, said that the continuing poverty that the report points to "speaks to more than a recession, especially in Philadelphia."

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