I have noticed how often stories about poverty talk about hunger and going hungry even though it is far far more likely that you will be evicted and become homeless.

I think "hunger" is a euphemism, but I don't know why. I feel there must be some sort of mind share that makes it OK to talk about poverty in terms of hunger even when there often isn't literal hunger, instead of in terms of homelessness.

I'm sure there's a reason... is this another byproduct of the Cold War? Like one reason why social class is talked about so frequently in terms of race in the U.S. is because during the Red Scare talking about class directly when officially we were in a classless society where "everyone was middle class" might get you labeled a Communist or Communist sympathizer, which back then was equivalent to being labeled a pedophile of pedophile sympathizer. So it had to be re-framed to hide what was really being talked about.

It certainly is a strange euphemism, though.