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Editor’s Note: This piece is the second in SAFN’s 2026 Anthropology News series on Temporality in Food Anthropology. If you haven’t already, read the first installment of this series by Janita Van Dyk here.
We’ve been using phrases such as “unprecedented times,” “unusual times,” or “challenging times” to capture the profound and destabilizing changes wrought by political actions over the last year, during the second Trump administration. Science research has been attacked and defunded, medical and public health funding reduced and programs eliminated, and individual scientists targeted because their studies revealed uncomfortable truths for an ideologically driven agenda. What we are experiencing are not normal time shifts or evolutions in cultural processes, but targeted attacks meant to eliminate our ability to teach critical thinking, especially about inequality. These are not “normal” times; we are enduring a war on science and truth designed to eliminate understanding of context-dependent health inequalities. This makes teaching about public health and nutrition difficult because our research benchmarks for measuring health problems have been corrupted. Yes, I use that word deliberately.
What does this mean for teaching about food insecurity and the health problems related to hunger “in these times?” By using this phrase I refer to the current, ideologically manufactured, political disruptions affecting the functioning of the US government and how those program changes effect teaching. As teachers we are placed in the position of reacting to the quixotic demands of these political times as they are channeled by educational institutions anxious to comply with ideological demands. But we are also simultaneously acting within a moment of temporal shock and expected to treat such changes as normative, requiring us to adapt our teaching methods to elide contentious or newly canceled research and case studies. I will provide examples to explain how the elimination of research funding by the Trump administration has made teaching core scientific and medical principles problematic, and how this ‘new normal’ creates intellectual confusion amongst students.
For 25 years I taught courses on the political economy of hunger and the social determinants of disease, focusing on agriculture, food insecurity and health in American higher education institutions. I used publications from US government agencies to teach core principles about the measurement of hunger, to illustrate the social construction of hunger-related inequalities in specific populations, and to provide case studies about measurement, treatment, and development projects designed to ameliorate food related problems in the US and abroad. Many of those agencies have been defunded or eliminated, or their research and reports have been canceled. This means that my students can no longer learn about assessment, treatment, and prevention within the United States and abroad from US sources; case studies from other countries must be accessed using multilateral agency reports and white papers.
One of the most critical reports used to explain food insecurity (FI) is the USDA Household Food Security in the United States report, published annually using data collected the previous year. In September of 2025 the USDA 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.” The reactionary politics are explicit in this statement. The USDA’s new solution to the problem of food insecurity is to stop asking people if they have enough food. With no data, there appears to be no need for action. Moreover, the assessment data provided annually was not only critical to understand trends in hunger within the US; it was a powerful teaching tool.
The assessment instrument, an 18-point questionnaire administered to adults in a representative sample of around 50,000 households each year, was a superb means to discuss data gathering, analysis, and demographic patterns. Many of my students were either in the School of Nursing, pre-med, or Public Health, and the questions could be examined through clinical and epidemiological lenses.
We workshopped and discussed how these questions and the associated problems might present within a clinic setting; students roleplayed asking patients about food security and how hunger might appear to the health practitioner. We discussed how to effectively and compassionately explore parental desires to deny food insecurity (FI) in fear of having children taken away by the Pennsylvania Office of Children, Youth, and Families (OCYF), and how hunger was a cultural taboo within American society, making people much more likely to hide food insecurity when asked by a clinician. Using additional readings and research, we thought through how FI can manifest as a symptom of other health problems, and could outline the circular feedback relationship between hunger, illness, and poverty. We examined the state-level demographics of hunger locality, connecting the dots between economic deprivation, structural and racial inequality, and state-level politics and poverty so that the context of food insecurity was revealed as structural rather than individual. We highlighted and assessed how and why women with children are more likely to live in households that are food insecure, and how intergenerational poverty and trauma relating to hunger affects child development and capacity. We looked at the starkly revealing graphs and maps to understand how poverty and FI were culturally created and determined processes rather than ones inherent to social groups or roles.
In short, we used the statistics of the report to humanize those whose health disparities rendered them invisible and subaltern to national dialogs about who is a deserving and representative citizen, and who is not. This report peeled back false narratives about self, health, and the economy to reveal how structural inequality determines who is ill, and why.
Of course, to understand food insecurity one must also study agriculture and the food system, particularly national policies affecting agricultural focus and output. The wider USDA/Economic Research Service (ERS) reports and research on US agriculture have always been critical to teaching these subjects to college students, especially because the data were available for download and analysis, and the reports were clearly written and accessible to the non-technical reader. Starting with the first Trump administration, the ERS was relocated from Washington DC to Kansas, an effort designed to force resignations among those scientists and statisticians who did not wish to move. The funding was also cut sharply. As Marion Nestle outlined in her analysis of the cuts, economic research in agricultural economy, food and nutrition, food safety, global markets and trade, and resources and environment were deeply affected and curtailed. In 2025, the funding for the USDA (and particularly the ERS) was further cut and accompanied by a wholesale DOGE-gutting of personnel and funding at all levels of department research, as well as revocation of grants awarded to colleges and institutions to collect and analyze economic data.
For decades, the ERS provided data about national and global agricultural processes and issued important reports such as an annual International Food Security Assessment document that predicted global food production and FI for the next ten years. ERS cuts mean that farmers are less likely to have access to reliable domestic reports about global food trade flows, and less able to predict and plan for ongoing farming and economic needs, which affects food availability and the economic viability of farms.
Furthermore, the curtailment of such ERS research means that a rich and trustworthy source of economic data was removed from the classroom, making case studies much less robust and far harder to analyze. For years, I had relied on the data tables from ERS to teach students about how agriculture was contextualized within the larger economy and culture, and as those data became increasingly spotty and compromised, their ability to access the numbers necessary to understand how and why the business of agriculture so deeply affected the demographics of food insecurity was similarly compromised. Connecting the dots between economy, production, and health status became much more difficult.
International data about agricultural production, demographics, economy, and health are fundamental to learning about food insecurity within the context of the social determinants of disease, and two essential sources of information were eliminated by the Trump administration in 2025 and 2026. The loss of the CIA World Factbook is a liner note, while the loss of USAID represents the destruction of a fundamental foundation for global health and wellbeing—as well as relevant and valuable data and reports.
The CIA World Factbook allowed students to access concise and current data about international countries. Since my classes always included a research report on agriculture, economy, food insecurity and health in a developing nation, the Factbook was a first-stop database for the beginning of the hypothesis quest. The country case study assignment was designed to familiarize students with international databases and analyses, and to use multilateral agency and NGO reports to identify when and where reliable information can be found, compared, and utilized effectively. Between the Factbook and the USDA ERS global databases, students could begin their research with domestic sources and then expand outwards into the differing types and classes of information-gathering agencies and organizations. The Factbook offered quick background information with which to create expanded hypotheses about how to do these kinds of research projects, how to find good health data, and (increasingly) how to identify accurate sources of information about their study topic.
The destruction of USAID is a tragedy—a willful, cruel, calculated means to harm the most vulnerable, gloatingly enacted by the most powerful. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people may sicken and die due to this act of cruelty. Moaning about the loss of teaching materials obviously pales in comparison, but I shall do so regardless. For 15 years I have relied upon the reports issued by the Feed the Future arm of USAID to teach about the connections between agricultural development and food security. The March 2014 policy reports titled Improving Nutrition Through Agriculture Brief Series provided a peerless outline of how to think through connections between economics and health, using—as any one of us would note—models developed with the aid of nutritional anthropologists. Feed the Future also funded programs offered by the One Acre Fund, providing case studies students explored to understand how food availability and health topics were affected by agricultural economics. Students quickly understood the contextual complexities of macro- and micro-economics after analyzing food security using Feed the Future modeling, case studies from the One Acre Fund and Feed the Future, and Roger Thurow’s text The Last Hunger Season—a journalistic account of how a One Acre Fund program boosted agricultural production and food availability in Kenya. Indeed, I was using a case study from the Feed the Future website last year in a classroom when it went dark, as the USAID program and its website were shuttered by the Trump Administration. That was, perhaps, an even greater temporal lesson about the “Political Economy of Hunger” for my students to learn, unfortunately.
In these “unprecedented” times, to reference the nauseating cliché used to distance the hearer from the consequences of public policy changes, we are confronting a future without accurate data to measure health problems related to food, and thereby eliminating the political logic for addressing those problems within the population. No numbers equal no problems. More critically for students—who inhabit a world filled with online information untethered from reality, truth, or context, and increasingly delegitimated by AI fantasies—this administration has compromised our ability to teach them how to connect the dots between health and society, and to recognize problems as real and actionable. Defunding population-level data collection effectively sunders the concept of the “public” from that of “health,” thus individualizing food insecurity and its clinical manifestations. In these times, I expect this is the point.
Ariana Gunderson is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.