Monitoring Food Hardship in the US
This project will collect monthly data on food insufficiency from a national sample of U.S. households. U-M will release quarterly issue briefs tracking the rate of food insufficiency overall and for key subgroups such as households with children and households with seniors, and will make the underlying microdata publicly available at no cost to users.
This work comes at a moment when a federal survey of household food security that had run annually for thirty years was recently cancelled, leaving a gap in the ability to track food-related hardship in the U.S. against a backdrop of rising prices, cuts to welfare programs, and pervasive economic uncertainty. The project aims to partially fill that gap, giving researchers and the public a continued, up-to-date picture of how vulnerable families are faring.
The project aims to promote public awareness and understanding of food hardship and contribute to U-M's reputation as a trusted, non-partisan source of high-quality economic data during a period of significant uncertainty for vulnerable families.
U-M Teams
Institute for Social Research (opens in new tab) (primary), Ford School of Public Policy (opens in new tab)
Secondary Contacts
Natasha Pilkauskas (Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Poverty Solutions)
