Why American Hunger And Food Insecurity Is Not A Game

Residents receive donated food items at Curley’s House Food Bank in Miami, Florida, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025. President Donald Trump further muddied the fate of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with a social media post Tuesday suggesting he would not provide benefits until after the government reopened. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg

© 2025 Bloomberg Finance LP

SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is at the core of the U.S. social safety net, and is essential to the functioning of the $1.1 trillion grocery industry. SNAP funding is being gamed as political leverage while 42 million food insecure Americans are held as collateral. The impacts on recipients and their families and communities, as well as the supply chains, charitable feeding programs and the grocery industry as a whole, will be long term and immense.

Over 12%, or one in eight Americans use SNAP, while 47 million Americans still go to bed hungry, a 40% increase over 2021. This includes 16 million or 17% of all U.S. children, as well as 10% of employed adults and 8% of older Americans.

Individual beneficiaries receive around $190 a month on pre-paid cards. A family of four qualifies with income under $3400 a month. In 2024, monthly SNAP benefits totaled approximately $8 billion, averaging $351.49 per household, or $100 billion a year. Food insecure households have to stretch these dollars wisely and rarely have enough to get through the month, let alone being able to afford high quality, nutrient dense and minimally processed fresh foods.

U.S. Food Insecurity Is Widespread

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines food security as “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.” Food insecurity, therefore is “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.” Hunger, on the other hand, is defined as “an individual-level condition that may be caused by food insecurity.”

Food insecurity often correlates with obesity, due to poverty and a lack of access to nutritious food. More than 37 million people in the U.S. live below the poverty line and poverty is the single largest cause of food insecurity. The U.S. minimum wage is essentially a poverty wage and most hourly blue collar jobs, especially in the food industry, pay far below a livable wage.

According to FoodPrint, “Low-income neighborhoods often lack grocery stores or other markets that carry a wide range of healthy foods and instead have a high prevalence of convenience stores and fast food restaurants. People living in poverty are less likely to have reliable transportation for shopping. Healthy foods tend to be more expensive than highly processed foods that are filling but have low nutritional value… when fresh produce is available in low-income areas, it is often of poor quality, making it less appealing to purchase.”

Federal food aid was started by the FDR Administration during the Great Depression to tie public provisioning to agricultural surpluses. Milked too many cows? Stockpile hard cheese for food pantries. Grew too much wheat? Bake bread for the bread lines. But it wasn’t enough.

According to Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, “In the late 1960s and 1970s, prompted by Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and widespread media coverage of the serious domestic hunger problem, a bipartisan coalition in Washington (including President Nixon, President Carter, conservative Republican Senator Robert Dole, and liberal Democratic Senator George McGovern) started the National School Breakfast Program and the Women, Infants, and Children Program for pregnant women and children under 5. Most significantly, they created the Food Stamp Program, which eventually enabled tens of millions of Americans to receive monthly benefits to help them afford groceries. Collectively, these programs worked spectacularly, almost entirely ending hunger in America.”

The assault on domestic food assistance was started by the Reagan-era GOP, which has only intensified under succeeding administrations. The Trump Administration’s Big Beautiful Bill took it to another level, cutting $187 billion from SNAP, or 20% of the total, saying it was being used by “illegal aliens” and was filled with “waste, fraud and abuse” while imposing stricter work requirements, or means testing, for qualification. The Trump Administration also canceled 84 million pounds of food aid scheduled to be distributed by charities, and abruptly ended the 27 year practice of collecting and publishing food insecurity data. Because how can you address food insecurity if you can’t measure it? Ending the war on hunger instead became a war on ending hunger.

Food insecurity now tends to be higher in so-called red states, due to high poverty, precarious employment and low wages. More than 15% of the population in Louisiana, Oklahoma and West Virgina rely on SNAP and so do more than 10% of Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina and Missouri. Texas is known as the “hungriest” state by advocates, due its enormous population, with one in ten residents on SNAP and one in six Texans facing hunger regularly. In 2023, 17.6% of Texans, some 5.4 million people, struggled with access to consistent, healthy food, up from 16.4% in 2022.

Food Banks Can’t Fill the SNAP Gap

SNAP typically feeds over 9 times as many people as all food banks combined. SNAP steers users directly to retailers and provides choice and dignity, and helps recipients avoid the stigma of waiting in line for hours at food banks.

“We can’t food bank our way out of hunger,” said Celia Cole, the CEO of Feeding Texas.

“Food banks and food pantry partners across the state are not going to be able to fill the hole that a lack of SNAP benefits is going to create,” stated Katy Andreson of RoadRunner Food Bank in New Mexico.

At $100 billion annually, SNAP accounts for about 9% of total grocery industry revenue. Most pantry items, such as meat, produce, grains, snacks and nonalcoholic beverages are eligible under SNAP. But many have gotten too expensive. Based on data shared by NIQ, grocery prices have increased 35% in the last 5 years and over 60% among the top consumed categories such as beef, milk, eggs, salty snacks and nonalcoholic beverages. It is no surprise that unit volumes have plummeted by 5% since 2021.

Over 250,000 retailers, including 27,000 rural stores, accept SNAP. Walmart is far and away the largest destination for SNAP users and also has over 14,000 employees in nine states that use SNAP. Dollar stores are also huge destinations for SNAP recipients, since most poverty stricken communities are pocketed with dollar stores. For many independent grocers, SNAP and WIC account for up to 70 percent of sales. When benefits drop, stores face immediate declines in demand, reduced hours, and losses of perishable foods. In all, SNAP sustains over 389,000 American jobs and creates over $20 billion in wages. The loss of SNAP will ripple across the supply chain, including wholesalers, distributors and producers.

“Not only would a cut in SNAP be devastating to my customers who live in the poorest county in the United States, it would be overwhelming to my team,” said R.F. Buche, President of G.F. Buche Co. “Loss of sales will no doubt mean a loss of available hours and potential loss of jobs for people I consider my family. Cutting jobs and hours in a place where jobs are extremely scarce would be devastating to all involved.”

“SNAP is one of the most effective public-private partnerships in American history,” said Stephanie Johnson, RDN, Group Vice President of Government Relations at the National Grocers Association. “Not only is there a high return on investment for taxpayers, but SNAP is a powerful economic engine for communities of all sizes, fueling the creation of over 389,000 local jobs”.

In 2025, twelve states, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia received federal approval to restrict the purchase of sugary foods such as soda and candy with SNAP benefits beginning in 2026. According to NIQ, SNAP restrictions may cut sales by up to 4% in many food categories. Private labels and cheaper, more highly processed products will likely benefit from the pullback in SNAP benefits.

Food Security And Federal Priorities

The Farm Bill is the primary legislation that sets the rules for SNAP, including changes to benefit levels, eligibility, and work requirements. The last Farm Bill expired on September 30, 2023, but was extended to September 30, 2025, via two one-year extensions.

But ensuring cash-strapped, underpaid, elderly and disabled Americans can eat takes a back seat to other government spending priorities. Federal defense spending will now top $1 trillion annually and over $170 billion has been budgeted for immigration enforcement, detainment, deportation and border security. Meanwhile, the Pentagon failed a $4 trillion audit and 67% of government defense contractor revenue was pocketed by shareholders of said defense contractors, a Robin Hood in reverse out of the pockets of taxpayers, enriching war profiteers while millions go hungry. Hunger at this scale is not a national security issue?

Playing games with SNAP shows that hunger, like poverty, is a deliberate policy choice. Ending hunger should always be a bipartisan issue, especially when public provisioning is such an immense economic engine, one that is so essential to the U.S. food supply.