Last week, the Trump administration canceled the government’s household food security reports, called “Food Security in the U.S.” The last report will be for 2024 and released in October.
This piled on other hunger problems for people in America: Food price increases in Kansas City, the Medicaid and SNAP nutrition benefit reductions in the One Big Beautiful Bill, and more recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatening to withhold $10.4 million in food assistance funding from Kansas.
Why? The USDA wants Kansas to turn over personal information of people who get food assistance. Gov. Laura Kelly said no.
Two things struck me about these occurrences: How will agencies responsible for getting food to people know what the needs are, and won’t this severely affect kids? With Axios-Kansas City reporting that overall food is up 3.2% in the Midwest from August 2024-August 2025, and meats, poultry fish and eggs up 5.6%, paying for meals is getting harder.
Oh yes, and one more thing, this incredibly partisan explanation of the reason for the survey cancellation. I’ve never read an official press release like this:
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the termination of future Household Food Security Reports. These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger. For 30 years, this study—initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments—failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder. Trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged, regardless of an over 87% increase in SNAP spending between 2019 – 2023. USDA will continue to prioritize statutory requirements and where necessary, use the bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available to it.”
Wow. Neutrality has left the government halls. But back to my original thoughts.
I called the folks at Harvesters — The Community Food Network, who are responsible for getting food to people who need it. Would the cancellation of this data collection be a hardship for them and food banks? Sarah Biles, director of communications, said yes.
“It is important data that we use all the time for a variety of different purposes here at the food bank,” she told me. “I mean, one is education to help us understand what the current situation is not only across the country but here in our 27 counties that we serve. And so that’s very important to us because as we see where food insecurity is, it’s not always rarely the same in every county.”
Biles noted Harvesters’ limited resources to spread to communities. “And so we look at that food insecurity rate in each county and that helps us determine where we need to have service — do we need to put more resources in one county this year because it’s gone up, or do we shift that from another county that maybe has less food insecurity?”
And by the way, Biles disputes the press release’s claims that “trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged regardless of an over 87% increase in SNAP spending between 2019 and 2023.”
Biles said the data doesn’t show that.
“Well, according to the data that we’ve been getting from that USDA report and then subsequently the map and meal gap data, that’s not true. As far as food insecurity, it has continued to rise. It has not gone down since COVID. It is the highest it’s been in a decade.”
“As far as food insecurity, it has continued to rise,” said Harvesters’ director of communications.
Hunger’s effects on children
Understanding need, and potentially getting it wrong without valid data, could affect all people who need food assistance, but will particularly neglect the littlest ones. Harvesters works with Feeding America, which also relies on the discontinued “Food Security in the U.S.” report. Since 2011, Feeding America has produced the “Map the Meal Gap” study, which provides county estimates of local food insecurity and food costs on an annual basis. You can see Kansas data here, and Missouri data here.
That’s what we’ll look at as we explore how child hunger makes a difference. I spoke to women in Kansas City and Kansas City, Kansas who are on the school front lines, who see children every day, and asked them about their students and hunger.
Charlesetta Jackson, Family Community Engagement Specialist for New Chelsea Elementary, KCK
Jackson clearly loves her students at New Chelsea Elementary (she calls them her scholars), getting emotional when she says that she, herself, has no children. She talked about the line outside her door in the morning. “And that is to help build that trusting relationship so that they’ll know that they have somebody that they can talk to. And if they even remotely look sleepy to me, I ask, ‘How you doing, baby? How was your evening? Are you sleepy this morning? OK, so we gonna have to focus today. We gonna get our breakfast and we’re going to have a good day,’” she tells them.
“I give them a hug and they’re on their way. And I think that really sets the tone for the student to know that somebody knows them by name.”
In Wyandotte County, where New Chelsea is, the food insecurity rate is 16.1%. Feeding America reports that an additional $17,718,800 is needed to meet the demands.
We talked about how food shortages have affected the students at New Chelsea. “Yes, the food shortage or the price increases has really impacted and hurt families. I am fortunate that Harvesters is a community partner of mine where they do supply back snacks for us. It starts in October, and just to show the effect of that a couple of years ago I was able to get 140 back snacks for 140 kids. in the last two years, I have only been able to get 20.”
Twenty! (The emphasis is mine.) These bagged snacks go home with students. She explained from the child’s point of view: “You might be at home by yourself. You can go in that back snack. It has a bottle of water. It has cereal. It has macaroni and cheese — things that the child could prepare for themselves without putting themselves in danger.
“So that is significant, because the requests and the increase from other districts and other places that they supply snacks for has just tremendously increased,” she said.
Blanca Villa Alva, Mental Health Liaison, Guadalupe Centers Elementary School, KC
In Jackson County, the food insecurity rate is 15.6%, and $80,747,000 is required to satisfy unmet food needs, according to Feeding America.
Villa emailed me to say that a common misconception is that the signs of hunger are easy to identify and visible to teachers and staff.
“The children who suffer from hunger will store food and try to save it for their homes. Some children will gladly and promptly eat all the lunch provided by the school. But in my experience, monitoring lunchtime reveals a different story; children often reject protein and vegetables, showing a lack of appetite. Instead, they brought candy from home, and when I tried to enforce the policy of having nutritious food, children felt a sense of injustice.”
Villa said children sometimes do this to try to bring food back home to other hungry family members.
That is when Villa began to realize that food insecurity and hunger can be unnoticed by both children and caregivers. It is “a source of discomfort and/or a barrier to nourishment. Addressing this issue requires time and effort from teachers and staff to acknowledge the problem and build connections between the child, the educators, and the families.”
Emily Hathaway, fourth grade teacher at Whittier Elementary, KCK
Because Hathaway is in front of students during the week, I wondered whether she connected hunger with performance.
“Obviously, if you’re hungry, you’re you’re not as alert, you’re going to be tired. Your mood’s just going to be grumpy. So, like, the effort’s not there. They are thinking about lunch and when they get to eat, and thinking about when they get to go home, if there’s going to be food. So all those invisible things you can’t see, that’s what they’re dealing with while trying to do the grade level work that you’re putting in front of them.”
Hathaway said sometimes she lets them sleep, “so then they’ve missed out on that content. But what’s more important than sleeping? So then just catching up is more difficult, because there isn’t time, there isn’t time to catch up. And then if they get sent to the nurse because they don’t feel good, or they get sent to go get a snack, that’s more time lost in the classroom.”
In fourth grade, Hathaway said children learn reading, writing and math, all important skills that could be hindered by hunger.
“So we’re learning how to become more independent readers, and reading to learn information on their own, summarizing that information. Math. You’re learning how to multiply and divide big numbers and see why that’s important in the real world. And writing, being able to write a summary, proper paragraphs, and then science and social studies, exposure to all the topics that they’ll see in middle school and high school.”
She worries her hungry students are not getting enough, and that concerns me, too. It should concern all of us.
Solutions to lack of data
Now there might be some good news on the horizon. Biles said Harvesters and its partner Feeding America are trying to come up with solutions. Feeding America works to get county need information more quickly than the USDA — which usually is one to two years old — and Harvesters is working on a pilot program to go deeper than county level to local level.
But these efforts were not because they knew the report was being canceled, Biles said.
“To my knowledge, we didn’t foresee something like this happening. I know I think the biggest challenge that we saw and that other food banks around the country saw with the USDA report is that delay, which wasn’t as concerning or significant before COVID, but COVID had such an impact on the need and the numbers that when we’re in 20 and 2021 and the data we’re getting is from, you know, 2019 or 2018. That doesn’t tell us what’s happening right now and where we need to put resources right now.”
How you can help
I asked the educators if they could ask for something, what would it be? Hathaway said getting donations of bottled water is important.
“The bottled water is a big thing. Some people don’t have the water on in their living situation, so just having that would be amazing, and if people came and dropped off food and helped out with the snacks. See, having people care about the children in the community.”
Villa emailed: “Being fed is the most basic need of humankind. It is correlated to being worthy of a caregiver’s attention and emotional nourishment; therefore, food directly impacts the child’s interpretation of whether or not the world is safe for the self.”
She wants to see students and families have access to nutritious food “in a trauma-informed setting where staff could be present, a setting where guardians could share resources and connect.”
And Jackson, nominated for a local TV station’s “Remarkable Women 2023” for the work that she does for her community, said New Chelsea needs the outdoor wooden food donation bins repaired or replaced. She recalled the generosity of a former student, who didn’t want to be identified, who stocked those bins one day with lots of food.
“He would not tell me who he was so I could send him a thank-you card or call him. And when I tell you he packed both of those bins, he did diapers, he just did everything. And after he did it, he said, ‘I just wish there was somebody like you when I was going to school who does what you do for your kids, your community and your families.’ And it just made me cry because the shortage is real.”
