Just a few days before Thanksgiving, new data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey showed that nearly 28 million people reported experiencing food scarcity in October — both the highest number of 2023 and the highest number recorded by the survey since December 2020.
It’s already been a difficult year on the hunger beat as many of the pandemic’s comparatively supercharged nutrition benefits, which had kept millions of Americans out of food insecurity, expired. However, the same issues that had inspired bipartisan support for ramping up SNAP in 2020, including surging inflation, unemployment and an ongoing labor crisis, hadn’t disappeared.
