The government has decided to stop counting hunger. Late last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would cancel the country’s annual food security survey — a statistical snapshot that, for three decades, has told us how many families struggle to put food on the table. Early Sunday morning, Eric Mitchell, the president of the Alliance to End Hunger, distilled the implications in a single line: “Hunger will not disappear simply because it is no longer tracked.”

The department’s justification was blunt, casting the survey as “redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous,” saying that the report had “failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.” Officials promised instead to rely on a “bevy of more timely and accurate data sets,” though none were specifie

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