Currently browsing posts about: Food-security

In September 2025, I was invited by the Flagstaff Family Food Center to give a talk on “Anti-Hunger Politics 2025: Planting Seeds for Resilience.”  This is an organization in Northern Arizona doing outstanding anti-hunger work.

The Center has just produced its 2025 Northern Arizona Food Equity Report.  The online copy is here.  It is well worth a look.

The Center sent this to me with this message:

We hope this resource can serve as a resource for multiple stakeholders across the food landscape, like you. Data and lived experience should always be the guiding light in this work, and we are proud to be part of a community that shares that sentiment and helps carry it out.

I wrote the Foreword to the report (see page 4).  Here’s what I said—and I meant every word:

It is my honor and privilege to introduce the impressive and utterly compelling
2025 Northern Arizona Food Equity Report. The Flagstaff Family Food
Center (FFFC) has done a superb job of collecting what must have been
incredibly hard-to-get data on hunger and food insecurity in the rural and
tribal communities it serves.

These data reveal a shocking truth: many people—even those working full- or
part-time—lack sufficient resources to feed themselves and their families
and require government and private food assistance to survive. Even working
people cannot keep up with the rising costs of housing, rent, utilities, and food.

Today, government food assistance programs like SNAP and WIC are under
siege and targeted for cuts, not increases. Private groups like FFFC do the
best they can to fill the gaps and meet the ever-increasing demands for
food assistance, especially from the most vulnerable members of society-
-children, the disabled, and seniors.

This report presents the stark facts: too many Northern Arizona residents
experience food insecurity, and their numbers are rising. It explains the
reasons for food insecurity, particularly for these communities, and draws on
the lived experience of community members to describe why this problem
requires an immediate solution. It describes potential policy solutions, and
the reality-based barriers to achieving them. And it presents this critically
important information without ever losing sight of the cultural context in
which food insecurity occurs in Northern Arizona.

These are tough times in America. Northern Arizona is fortunate to have a
group like the FFFC doing the hard work and clear thinking needed to solve
some of the most difficult problems facing our society today.

Last September, the USDA said it would stop conducting the annual hunger survey, because they were “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.”

As I said at the time,

If you live in an Orwellian universe, you can use not measuring to pretend that food insecurity does not exist and certainly that it is not increasing as a result of your policies.

It took a long time for the anti-hunger community to achieve federal documentation of this enormous social problem.  I suppose we will now have to go back to the old days of local anti-hunger reports.  See my comments (with Sally Guttmacher) on state hunger reports.

On December 30, the USDA published the last of its formerly annual reports: 2024 Household Food Security report.

The inconvenient finding continues: food insecurity continues to rise.

And this was before the current Trump-era cuts to SNAP and increases in the cost of food and health care.

No wonder they don’t want to publish reports like these any more.

According to the Wall Street Journal (sent to me by Lindsey Smith Taillie, who is quoted in the story), the USDA will no longer be collecting data on food insecurity after this year.

“This nonstatutory report became overly politicized and upon subsequent review, was unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department,” USDA spokesman Alec Varsamis said.

He added that the 2024 report will be released on Oct. 22, but the 2025 report has been discontinued.

I then received USDA’s official notice.

Costly and politicized, yes.  But redundant and fear-mongering?  Hardly.

It’s easy to understand this kind of rhetoric.

The last report, Household Food Security in the United States in 2023, published this extremely inconvenient finding.

It’s pretty hard to justify cutting food assistance funding when food insecurity is rising to levels like those in the 2008 recession.

Cuts and changes to SNAP are leaving a lot up to states, which will have a hard time with it.

If you live in an Orwellian universe, you can use not measuring to pretend that food insecurity does not exist and certainly that it is not increasing as a result of your policies.

It took a long time for the anti-hunger community to achieve federal documentation of this enormous social problem.  I suppose we will now have to go back to the old days of local anti-hunger reports.  See my comments (with Sally Guttmacher) on state hunger reports.

Truly, we are living in Orwellian times.  May we find our way out of them soon.

Marianna Chilton.  The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again.  MIT Press, 2024. 366 pages.

MIT Press asked me to do a back-cover blurb for this book, which I was pleased to do.

Marianna Chilton’s uncompromising book cuts to the heart of what’s wrong with America’s “safety net” for poverty and hunger.  Her tough analysis derives from the lived experience of people dependent on this system despite its demonstrable inadequacies, inequities, and indignities.

This is one tough book to read, as Chilton warns us right from the start.  Accepting food and financial assistance is a deeply humiliating experience.  Worse, it is intended to be so, right from the start.

Chilton’s work is highly unusual.  She gains the trust of participants in this system by listening closely when they tell her what it is really like for them, and how they feel about it.

This system is so bad and self-sustaining that nothing short of  a complete overhaul can fix it.  We could, should, must do better.

She says:

Poverty costs the United States at least $1.03 trillion a year.  For every dollar spent on reducing childhood poverty, the country would save at least $7 in government spending to address the health and social problems that arise from poverty…To fix this, we need to spend more money to help people avoid poverty; we need to fix the tax code, wage structures, and many other policies that exclude and exploit people who are poor so the wealthy will stop profiting off them.

Chilton recommends the universals:

• Universal health care
• Universal Basic Income
• Universal school meals
• Universal child care

Anything short of that keeps the current system in place.

I am late getting to this report but am finally ready to take it on.

This is the annual report from FAO, which always tries to put as positive a spin on its findings as it can.

The press release says:

Hunger numbers stubbornly high for three consecutive years as global crises deepen: UN report

1 in 11 people worldwide faced hunger in 2023, 1 in 5 in Africa

Rio de Janeiro – Around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, equivalent to one in eleven people globally and one in five in Africa, according to the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report published today by five United Nations specialized agencies.

Each of these reports tries to do something different, and this one is about financing.  It talks about the cost of a health diet (CoHD).

The CoHD has risen worldwide since 2017 (the first year for which FAO disseminates estimates) and continued to rise in 2022, peaking at an average of 3.96 PPP dollars per person per day in 2022. This represents a surge in the global average CoHD, from a 6 percent increase between 2020 and 2021 to an 11 percent increase the following year…Despite the increase in the CoHD, the number of people in the world unable to afford a healthy diet fell for two consecutive years, from 2020 to 2022. Worldwide, an estimated 35.5 percent of people in the world (2.83 billion) were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2022, compared with 36.5 percent (2.88 billion) in 2021.

So the good news is that the percentage of people who can’t afford to eat healthfully dropped by 1%.

That’s still a third of people in the world.

Impossible.  Unacceptable.  And tragic and frustrating beyond belief.

Resources

• The FAO home page for these reports
• The 2024 report
• The press conference
• Press materials and video

The USDA has released its annual report on Household Food Security in the United States in 2023.

The news is not good.

What’s especially tragic is the reversal of the pandemic decline in food insecurity.

Pandemic income support and higher SNAP benefits did exactly what they were supposed to.  They reduced poverty.

Congress, in its infinite wisdom, stopped those benefits.

The results are entirely predictable.

These, alas, are political choices.

There’s an election coming up soon…

Resources

• Food Security in the U.S.  Food security means access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.
• Food Security in the United States
• Household Food Security in the United States in 2023: An estimated 13.5 percent of households (18.0 million) were food insecure in 2023, meaning they had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources.
• Statistical Supplement to Household Food Security in the United States in 2023: Statistics presented in the supplement are based on data collected in the Current Population Survey (CPS) Food Security Supplement conducted in December 2023.

It takes a while for USDA to catch up to the data so its most recent report on food insecurity ends with 2021: “Household Food Insecurity Across Race and Ethnicity in the United States, 2016-21.”

The highlights:

▪ The prevalence of food insecurity ranges from a low of 5.4% for Asian households to a high of 23.3% for American Indian and Alaska Native households. Food-insecure households had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all household members because of a lack of resources.
▪ Food insecurity varied substantially by country of origin. Among Hispanic origin subgroups, food insecurity varied from 11.4% in Cuban households to 21% in Dominican households. Food insecurity among Asian origin subgroups ranged from 1.7% in Japanese households to 11.4% in other Asian households.

But where is the trend?  The report did not include a trend line (could politics have something to do with this?).

Fortunately, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities used the USDA data to produce this:

It’s a sad story of policy failure.  We had one that worked during the pandemic.  But Congress chose to end demonstrably effective measures.  Politics wins over science, in this case tragically.

Overall, food insecurity increased from 10.2 percent in 2021 to 12.8 percent in 2022 — resulting in 10.3 million more people, including 4.1 million more children, who lived in households that experienced food insecurity in 2022 compared to 2021 — reflecting higher food costs and the phasing out of many pandemic relief measures.

Martin Caraher, John Coveney, Mickey Chopra, editors.  Handbook of Food Security and Society.  Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023.  

I did a blurb for the back cover:

This Handbook argues convincingly that ending hunger means far more than providing food to those in deed.  It means transforming society to one that is more equitable, socially as well as economically.  The chapters here are a rich source of data, analysis, and inspiration about how to work toward that transformation—and the sooner, the better.

The 24 chapters by many authors cover case studies (Ireland, South Africa), measurement and naming of hunger and food insecurity, the right-to-food movement, lived experiences, gender issues, policy approaches (successful and not), financialization, charitable and philanthropic approaches, and the effects of COVID-19 and the Ukraine war.

They also include critical theoretical and practical discussions of what can be done, from food banks to cooperatives to economic policies.

On this last point, Tim Lang’s concluding chapter on “The intransigence of food insecurity: questioning the realities,” makes the book worth reading on its own.

This chapter began with the argument that food insecurity is a material reality and almost entirely located in low-income countries with food deficits.  Instead, it has suggested that we should see food insecurity as both an absolute and a relative phenomenon, as socially determined, therefore socially resolved.  If we so wish, we could shift entire populations across the FAO’s food insecurity continuum.  This would require multiple points of intervention.  There is no single policy lever to right food wrongs.

I particularly like his table summarizing what food industries could do for food insecurity—lots, as it happens, not least paying workers higher wages.