When the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would stop producing its Household Food Security report after Oct. 22, I felt disbelief and immediate concern as a researcher and scholar of food security in Hampton Roads. For nearly three decades, this annual report has been the nation’s moral compass on hunger, revealing who is struggling to eat, where gaps persist, and how policy shifts ripple through real lives. Local governments do not readily have the capacity to measure household food security. Ending it now means flying blind at a time when food insecurity is rising again.

In 2023, the report showed that 47.4 million Americans — including 13.8 million children — have low and very low food security. That’s 1 in 7 households. Behind every data point is a family deciding between

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