Happy Friday, and welcome to Food Fix. If you’ve been wrangling kids through the back-to-school season, I’m sending you extra good vibes. It’s a lot!
Food Fix under 40: I was honored to be included in the Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness’ “40 Food Safety Professionals Under 40” Class of 2024. Check out the full line-up of “rising stars” trying to improve food safety, from industry to academia, across dozens of different organizations.
Forego Food Fix FOMO: If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, you’re missing out! Upgrade to get Food Fix in your inbox twice a week. (P.S. Take us up on special rates for students and free subs for anyone who qualifies for nutrition assistance by emailing info@foodfix.co.)
Alright, let’s get to it –
Helena
***
Why food insecurity is getting worse
In 2023, the number of Americans experiencing food insecurity jumped for the second consecutive year, according to data released by the Agriculture Department this week.
What is food insecurity? It’s helpful to define terms here, because most people (and certainly most reporters) don’t know. Unlike hunger, where households skip meals and truly do not have enough to eat, food insecurity is more a measure of precarity.
USDA defines food insecurity as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.” Very low food security, which USDA also tracks closely, is more akin to what most people think of as hunger. This measures households where food intake is reduced or disrupted due to a lack of money or resources.
The national food insecurity rate in 2023 was the highest we’ve seen in nearly a decade.
That 13.5 percent rate – up from 12.8 percent in 2022 – equates to more than 1 in 8 American households, or about 47 million people. The rate of very low food security held steady at 5.1 percent – not good, certainly, but not worse than the previous year.
On the heels of a historically big increase in 2022, this latest uptick in food insecurity signals a trend, not a blip. As you can see from this chart from USDA’s Economic Research Service, these recent rates are a pretty dramatic reversal. Until recently, food insecurity had been on a fairly steady and sustained decline since the Great Recession and its aftermath wreaked havoc on the economy.
As I’ve written before, food insecurity didn’t spike during the first years Covid-19 rocked the country and the economy. It’s somewhat counter intuitive, but the rate actually held steady overall (child poverty also fell to historic lows, but has since rebounded). The prevailing theory is that all of the federal aid from Washington during those early years blunted the expected increases in hardship. And there was plenty of aid, from the expanded Child Tax Credit payments, stepped up Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP) benefits, universal free school meals, stimulus checks and so on. Most of this extra assistance has since dried up, of course, as Washington feared its spending helped fuel inflation.
Inflation, inflation? It all sort of makes sense logically, but much of the pandemic aid ended in 2022, so why did food insecurity still go up so much in 2023? Well, we don’t really know. One of the challenges with these USDA reports is they don’t look at causes – it’s purely a measurement of where things stand. However, the experts who follow these rates closely point to food inflation as a major factor.
While CPI (Consumer Price Index) data show that the rate of grocery inflation has slowed substantially, food is still just so much more expensive than it was a few years ago, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
It’s hard to tease out what’s driven by government aid expiring vs. food inflation vs. broader macroeconomic conditions. It’s all complicated. But it does seem that food inflation has been perhaps underappreciated as a driver of overall hardship. Angela Rachidi with the American Enterprise Institute and Craig Gundersen of Baylor University published a paper earlier this year finding that inflation and changes to USDA’s survey design largely explained the rise in food insecurity in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic levels. I asked Rachidi this week what she made of the 2023 numbers.
“The growth of inflation had slowed, but inflation was still high,” Rachidi said. “The fact that the very low food security rate didn’t change reinforced my thinking around the state of the economy – that we weren’t probably seeing this huge increase in need and hardship. The increase in the food insecurity rate is the result of a kind of perception and feeling more constrained.”
I also pinged Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a researcher at Northwestern University (who’s soon joining Georgetown University), about the latest data, and she, too, pointed to inflation.
“We’ll be able to put them in better context after the poverty numbers come out next week, but in general, it’s pretty consistent with the cumulative impacts of higher inflation,” Schanzenbach said in an email. “Even though inflation has cooled in recent months, the damage is hard to reverse.”
Regardless of what’s driving the recent increase in food insecurity, many experts are concerned about the trend. “The levels are just too high,” said Schanzenbach, noting that the latest report shows 27.5 percent of Black households with children and 26 percent of Hispanic households with children were food insecure in 2023. (This is more than double the rate for white households with children, which was 13.3 percent in 2023.)
Glaring disparities: Anti-hunger advocates responded to the latest data by calling on policy makers to strengthen safety net programs, reinstate the expanded Child Tax Credit and so on, while highlighting the deep racial disparities once again on display. (We covered this hunger divide in an earlier edition of Food Fix.)
In a statement on Wednesday, president of the Alliance to End Hunger Eric Mitchell called the latest USDA report “damning.”
“Policymakers must take immediate and decisive action to reverse these deeply troubling trends,” Mitchell said. “It is unconscionable that factors such as race, ethnicity, and income determine who has enough to eat in America and who does not, but the data are clear: last year, food insecurity among Black and Hispanic Americans was more than twice as high as white Americans, and afflicted nearly 40 percent of people at or below the poverty threshold.”
What’s next? What is it going to take to curb food insecurity? Should we expect it to go back down? I don’t see Washington increasing nutrition or other federal aid anytime soon. If food costs remain relatively high, food insecurity is likely to do the same.
***
What I’m reading
Trump can make America healthy again (Wall Street Journal). “Americans are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system isn’t addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy and our global standing,” writes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in an op-ed. “Mr. Trump has made reforming broken institutions a cornerstone of his political life. He has become the voice of countless Americans who have been let down by our elites. He could unite the country by making it his priority to make America healthy again.” RFK recommends tackling conflicts of interest in the dietary guidelines process, reforming farm subsidies, and banning soda and processed foods from SNAP, among other things.
Harris abandons 2019 pledge to ban plastic straws (Axios). “When Vice President Kamala Harris ran for president in 2020, she said plastic straws should be banned. On Thursday, her campaign says that’s no longer her position,” writes Alex Thompson. “Banning plastic straws to protect the environment and marine life is the latest progressive issue on which Harris and her campaign have either declined to comment or changed her position. Many parts of the country have banned plastic straws as concerns have grown about plastic pollution in oceans and waterways.”
Where’s the beef? Trump demands Harris prove she had McJob (The Daily Beast). “As Kamala Harris races to capture the Big Mac Voter, the Trump campaign is doubling down on its demand for proof that she worked at McDonald’s in college,” reports Mary Ann Akers. “Donald Trump has attacked the Democratic presidential nominee’s McDonald’s street creds as fake, accusing her of lying about having worked there as a college student. The smear tactics don’t appear to be letting up. A Harris campaign official says she worked at a Golden Arches franchise in Alameda, California, during the summer of 1983, between her freshman and sophomore years as a Howard University college student.”
Methane-busting feed supplements are beginning to scale. But who will foot the bill, and what will drive widespread adoption? (AgFunder News). “While burping cows and other ruminants are some of the leading sources of methane emissions, a surprisingly small sum—little more than $233 million according to AgFunder data—has been pumped into startups tackling the problem over the past decade,” writes Elaine Watson. “The bulk of that capital has gone into red seaweed-based feed supplements, which require ‘patient capital,’ notes Tom Puddy at Australia-based SeaStock, one of several startups growing Asparagopsis to feed livestock for methane reduction. ‘Investors are very skeptical about investing in large-scale aquaculture projects as there have been some spectacular disasters in areas such as algae biofuels and massive prawn farming systems.’”
Are some ultraprocessed foods worse than others? (New York Times). “The researchers also analyzed whether certain types of ultraprocessed foods were more associated with cardiovascular disease than others,” writes Alice Callahan. “Of the 10 ultraprocessed food categories they looked at, two were clearly associated with greater risk: sugar-sweetened drinks (like soda and fruit punch) and processed meat, poultry and fish (like bacon, hot dogs, breaded fish products, chicken sausages and salami sandwiches). When these two categories were excluded from the data, most of the risk associated with ultraprocessed food consumption disappeared, said Kenny Mendoza, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who led the analysis.”
Federal facilities dramatically expand plant-based or vegetarian options (EWG). “Federal facilities almost doubled the plant-based or vegetarian options they offer workers and visitors than last year, a new EWG survey finds,” per a blog post by Sher Chowdhury and Geoff Horsfield. “Almost 90 percent of federal facilities provided a plant-based option more than three days a week, the minimum voluntary standard for federal facilities, compared to last year, when we found that was true of just 49 percent of facilities surveyed.”
***
Upgrade today to get more from Food Fix
Become a paid subscriber to unlock access to two newsletters each week, packed with insight, analysis and exclusive reporting on what’s happening in food, in Washington and beyond. You’ll also get full access to the Food Fix archive – a great way to get smart on all things food policy.
Expense it: Hey, it’s worth asking! Most paid subscribers expense their subscriptions through work. We also offer discounts for government, academia and students. See our subscription options. Individuals who participate in SNAP or other federal nutrition programs qualify for a free Food Fix subscription – just email info@foodfix.co.
Get the Friday newsletter: If someone forwarded you this email, sign yourself up for the free Friday edition of Food Fix. You can also follow Food Fix on X and LinkedIn.
See you next week!
