EXPERTS ADVISORY

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has stopped its annual Household Food Security Report, the government’s primary measure of hunger and food insecurity in the United States.

University of Michigan experts are available to discuss the implications of ending this decades-long data collection effort.

Kate Bauer, associate professor of nutritional sciences at the School of Public Health, has researched nutritional security and related policies, and engaged in community projects to understand and improve those policies. Her expertise touches on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, school meals and other nutritional aid for people struggling to afford food.

“The USDA’s annual report on Household Food Security in the United States is a critical resource. The long history of these data allows us to understand changes in community food security,” she said. “They also show us the depth of hunger in the U.S., for example, the number of U.S. children who have to skip meals because there’s not enough food at home.

“Eliminating the resource is eliminating the most rigorous, objective method to evaluate how changes to our federal budget will affect Americans. Without these data, we will be flying blind, not knowing whether our policy changes are working and not knowing how we should be spending money to best help Americans.”

Contact: [email protected]

Natasha Pilkauskas, associate professor at the Ford School of Public Policy and expert at U-M Poverty Solutions, conducts research that considers how demographic, social safety net and economic shifts in the U.S. affect families and children with low incomes. Her work also considers economic insecurity, poverty and family well-being.

“Tracking food insecurity in the U.S. is extremely important,” she said. “The measures researchers use were developed by the USDA, are well-validated and have been used extensively in different contexts.

“If we don’t continue to track food insecurity how will we know if it is changing over time—be it for better or worse? It is especially important to continue to track trends now so we can understand how forthcoming changes to SNAP or other policies that might affect the price of food and basic necessities, might impact families’ ability to feed themselves.”

Contact: [email protected]

Jennifer Garner, the John G. Searle Assistant Professor of Nutritional Sciences at the School of Public Health, conducts research on federal nutrition programs, food security and the effects of food policy on maternal and child health.

“President Trump has touted the importance of gold-standard science. The annual food security report is exactly that,” she said. “I am sincerely confused, despite a decade of work in this space, how this report could be seen as ‘redundant’ or ‘extraneous’ given our lack of other rigorous means for monitoring the impact of our existing federal investments.

“It suggests that there is a desire to not know how national food security rates will fluctuate in response to current policy experiments; perhaps this is what they mean by the report being ‘politicized.’ In a country focused on chronic disease prevention, I would remind the current administration that food security is more highly linked with chronic disease risk than poverty itself.”

Contact: [email protected]