Abundance and Insecurity: Fifty Years of Food Security in the United States (1975–2025)

The United States is the world's largest agricultural exporter and among its most productive farm economies. USDA Economic Research Service estimates show that US farm output nearly tripled between 1948 and 2021, growing by 1.46% per year with almost no increase in total inputs, so that the growth came entirely from gains in total factor productivity. Yet national abundance has not guaranteed household food security. Since federal measurement began in 1995, between about 10% and 15% of US households have been food-insecure in any year: 10.7% in 2001, a peak of 14.9% in 2011 after the Great Recession, a low of 10.5% in 2019–2020, and a rise to 12.8% in 2022 and 13.5% in 2023 as pandemic-era benefits expired and food prices rose. In 2023, 5.1% of households had very low food security. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps) is the principal safety net. It expanded from 2.9 million participants in 1969 to a peak of 47.6 million (15% of the population) in fiscal year 2013, and served about 41.7 million people in 2024. This review traces the five decades from 1975 to 2025 across the four pillars of food security. It shows that the US combines exceptional availability with persistent access problems shaped by poverty, unemployment, regional deprivation and policy choices. Utilisation problems are expressed in high rates of diet-related disease. Long-term stability risks include groundwater depletion in the High Plains, climate extremes and concentration in food supply chains. The United States ranked 13th of 113 countries in the 2022 Global Food Security Index with a score of 78.0.