In this episode, Raj chats with Hannah Shultz to unpack what rising food prices actually mean for food access and food insecurity in the United States. From grocery store sticker shock to broader policy decisions, this conversation connects everyday experiences to the larger systems shaping who can afford to eat and how.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

Lauren Lavin:

Hey, everybody, and welcome back to Plugged in to Public Health. This week’s episode is just a little different as it’s led by one of our fellow student hosts, Raj, and it’s actually part of a two-part conversation. So I’m Lauren and I’m going to pass this off to Raj. You did a great job and I loved listening and being able to edit this conversation. And I’m excited for you to be able to hear both parts over the next two weeks.

Plugged in to Public Health is produced and edited by the students at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, and the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

Raj Daliboyina:

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Plugged in to Public Health. Today we are talking about rising foot prices and what they mean for food access, health, and communities. And we’re joined by Professor Hanna Shultz to help us break it down.

I’m Raj, and if it’s your first time with us, welcome. And for everyone else, welcome back. We are a student run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they’re relevant to everyone, both in and outside the field of public health. So now let’s get Plugged in to Public Health.

Hi, Hannah. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s great having you here. So could we start with, can you introduce yourself and explain your role at the College of Public Health and outside in Feeding America?

Hannah Shultz:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. It’s always weird to hear an introduction where I’m called Professor Hannah Shultz. I am an adjunct professor here at the University of Iowa. I teach a class called Why Do We Eat What We Eat, which works with undergrad students to examine all the different levels of the food system or many different levels of the food system.

Outside of the University of Iowa, I work for Feeding America, which is a network of food banks across the country. We have over 200 food banks, about 60,000 meal programs and pantries that we work with to help combat food insecurity in the country.

I am here today as myself. So nothing I’m saying is representative of Feeding America, but I’m really excited to be here and talk about something that I care a whole lot about.

Raj Daliboyina:

Awesome. And I think working in the field of food and around food insecurity is amazing, especially these times. So for our listeners who may not be familiar with this, how would you define food insecurity in USA in today’s times? And how has the definition of it changed over time?

Hannah Shultz:

So food insecurity, there are a number of definitions you can find, but essentially food insecurity are people who are experiencing food insecurity have a hard time providing enough food for themselves and their families. The most recent official data from the USDA we have is from 2024. It just came out a couple of weeks ago in February actually, and it says that one in seven families in the US is food insecure. So that’s nearly 14% of people in the US are experiencing food insecurity at some point during the year. Unfortunately, at the end of 2025, USDA announced that they would no longer be doing the food insecurity study. So 2024 may be the last year we have official government numbers for this for a while.

Food insecurity has changed a lot over the years and the who experiences food insecurity, who is at risk for experiencing food insecurity has changed a lot as well. We’ve seen some interesting things in the last several years, especially with the COVID pandemic and a lot of the programs that emerged in response to that. So food insecurity actually decreased during the pandemic because there were so many government programs that stepped in to provide additional food assistance and additional income assistance for families. So we’re actually now seeing higher rates of food insecurity than we did at the height of the pandemic, which I think many people are surprised to hear about that because in the pandemic there was so much focus on lines at food banks and lines at food pantries. But food pantries and food banks are actually experiencing more need, more volume now than they were at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Raj Daliboyina:

That’s really interesting since there’s a contrast between the pandemic and non-pandemic times. I think people would generally assume times were better when the non-pandemic times, but I think that’s really enlightening. And do you think the rising food prices and the inflation is really changing the landscape for food insecurity these days?

Hannah Shultz:

Anecdotally, I would say absolutely. I don’t have any studies to point to right at this time, but sure. I think many of us are experiencing pressure at the grocery store that we haven’t. Either we haven’t experienced before because we live in food secure households where we haven’t had trouble providing enough food for our families. I know a lot of people who have never struggled to buy groceries are now having to reevaluate their grocery budgets and make different decisions about what they buy.

I know a year ago or in the last couple of years, we’ve had a lot of fluctuation in egg prices. That’s been a really big conversation in the class I teach. Students will come in complaining that their eggs were $8 when they went grocery shopping over the weekend. And I think really eggs provide a really interesting case study, I think, because I did not actually know that egg prices were going up for a while, even though I’m fully in this world in my professional life and volunteer life and personal life. But I buy eggs from local producers and the cost of eggs from local producers did not go up because those producers were not experiencing bird flu and the other challenges that were wiping out egg production in other places.

So I think the cost of groceries has so many different factors, including international trade, what we’re prioritizing, importing from Mexico or from other countries, as well as changing federal policies about what school lunches buy. That can really change buying habits for a lot of people. And thinking about how close we are to our producers, depending what pressures they’re facing, the cost can fluctuate a lot.

In my experience, the cost with supporting local producers often fluctuates less than the cost of supporting big multinational corporations. There are a number of reasons for this, and I don’t think supporting local producers is something that everyone can easily do. It takes additional time. Oftentimes, things are more expensive. Finding those local producers is much harder than just going to Hy-Vee or Fairway or Walmart and buying your groceries. It is interesting to look at what dynamics are at play there when we’re looking at local food systems versus global food systems and how much prices might be impacted by global trends.

Raj Daliboyina:

And if you really look into it, I think would you say that if it was a gradual change of prices versus the kind of fluctuations that we see these days, do you think that there is a contrast in the way that it affects food insecurity? What I mean is if the prices are just generally there’s a trend that people can follow and predict, would that not be a different kind of an effect on insecurity when it comes to actually, okay, having a $8 price on eggs in one month and then dropping down to two the next month? So the unpredictability, do you think that really affects food insecurity by and large?

Hannah Shultz:

Sure, lack of predictability is challenging for all kinds of reasons, right? I think one of the things that I talk with my students about is asking why. There’s a facilitation method I really love called liberating structures. And one of the liberating structures is you ask why nine times to figure out the root cause of why something’s happening. If you actually ask why nine times, someone’s going to think you’re an annoying toddler who can’t figure anything out or is just learning how to communicate, but the idea is still good. Continue asking why.

So might it be fluctuating prices? Maybe, but food insecurity looks so many different ways. We know more with what? 30 to 40 million people, sometimes more in the US are food insecure, and why each one of those people is experiencing food insecurity may be different. So asking why is really important. For some families, absolutely fluctuating prices is going to be a challenge.

Just as an example, if I ask someone, “Why are you having trouble affording groceries?” It might be, “Well, I was sick last week, so I wasn’t able to work every day,” which is different than someone who is able to work every day, but just doesn’t have wages that are sufficient to cover their costs. Maybe they’re a caregiver for young children or an elderly person or adult with disabilities in their family. Their ability to make money outside of the home is going to be very different than someone who’s able to work every day and maybe just doesn’t have the wages that are keeping up with inflation.

Raj Daliboyina:

Yeah. Yes, predictability always helps, I must say. And for the eggs, I must say, eggs do have a very nutritious value. Back home in India, we used to have a whole campaign to make sure that the midday meals for kids had an egg included in it. And there was a whole campaign that was like a funny rhyme that would say, “From Sunday to Monday, every day you need to eat an egg.”

Hannah Shultz:

All right.

Raj Daliboyina:

Yeah.

Hannah Shultz:

I’ll keep that in mind. We do eat a lot of eggs at my house, so good to know we’re meeting Indian nutrition standards.

Raj Daliboyina:

Oh, yeah.

Hannah Shultz:

We eat a lot of Indian food at my house too, so that works.

Raj Daliboyina:

Coming to food, I think that gives me a great segue. What do you think about the farm bill? There’s a lot of conversation about the farm bill that’s coming around food systems. And from your perspective, what role does it play in shaping food access and food insecurity in USA today?

Hannah Shultz:

The farm bill is really interesting, especially right now. So the farm bill, for people who aren’t super familiar with it, the farm bill has been around for decades. It really emerged out of programs following World War II as part of the New Deal. And the farm bill has always married agriculture policy with food policy as a way to get the political buy-in necessary to get these laws passed.

So the kind of political wisdom has always been that urban people care more about food insecurity and rural people care more about agriculture. Clearly, this is a huge oversimplification. But in order to get support from representatives in urban and rural areas, these programs have been married together to ensure passage.

So the farm bill has always, for the last many decades, included food programs like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and many other food programs. It’s also included support for farmers through crop insurance or direct subsidies. How that looks has changed a lot over the years and changes depending on the farm bill, depending on who is in power at the time.

Right now, the farm bill is really interesting because it is several years overdue and many of the programs that are usually dealt with in the farm bill were part of the One Big Beautiful Bill last summer or HR1, including cuts to SNAP, cuts to Medicaid, which will impact people who would benefit from SNAP. So many of these programs have been taken out of the farm bill and dealt with in that way, which will make it really interesting to look at how the farm bill negotiations go.

If this political wisdom of urban people care more about food insecurity and that is now going to be less a part of the farm bill, or maybe it’s not, we’ll see. I think every time I look into what’s going on with the current farm bill negotiations, it’s something different and surprising. So I’m really curious when One Big Beautiful Bill Act came out last summer, I was really surprised at how radically it was changing SNAP and thinking through how that may be impacting future negotiations for other food and ag policies.

Raj Daliboyina:

Do you think we have a timeline on the negotiations in any way?

Hannah Shultz:

I’m sure someone does, but I don’t.

Raj Daliboyina:

[inaudible 00:13:33]-

Hannah Shultz:

I care a lot about policy, but my job is not policy, and so I’m much less connected to advocacy and policy than I have been in the past when it’s been a bigger part of what I do.

Raj Daliboyina:

Yeah. I think it’s across the spectrum, everything is blurred these days.

Hannah Shultz:

Right. Nothing is working the way we think that things have worked or should work.

Raj Daliboyina:

Yeah. Okay, something close to the … As we are talking about this, what do you think about, there’s a lot of discussion about labor shortages in agriculture these days and how they may affect the supply chains and the prices, and how do you see these workforce challenges influencing food access and affordability?

Hannah Shultz:

Am I allowed to curse?

Raj Daliboyina:

You are in your own personal space here, so you’re good to do whatever you think is perfect.

Hannah Shultz:

Okay. Labor and food supply chains is really … It’s a really interesting thing to look at. In the class I teach, we read a book called Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies by Seth Holmes. The book was researched about 25 years ago and came out more than 10 years ago so some of the topics it covers are a little dated and some of the policies it addresses are dated, but it does give readers, and especially the students who I discuss it with, a lot of insight into what it’s like to work, to do farm labor.

I think we have a few different farm and ag systems in this country. So we have large row crop commodity farmers who are able to grow thousands of acres. They work really hard, they work really long hours, and they can produce several tons of food that then can get turned into sugar or alcohol or many other of the ingredients that are used to produce our food supply.

Then there are other farmers who are producing vegetables and fruits in the United States, we ironically call those specialty crops. They’re the crops that we can eat fresh from the field. And those tend to be much more labor-intensive and rely on, in many cases, migrant laborers. So if we’re thinking about fruit production in California or Washington or Florida, a lot of berries and other more delicate fruits have to be picked by hand or else they’re not going to be great to eat. However, none of us want to pay $20 for a pint of strawberries. We want to pay $3 for a pint of strawberries. And in order to get that, we need to consider what labor goes into that and how much we’re willing to pay for that labor.

Farm laborers, there’s a reason that it’s very heavily done by immigrant workers, workers who may or may not have legal documentation to be here. There’s a lot of mixed status families and mixed status labor groups on different farms. All right, we’ll edit out this pause because I lost my train of thought.

So thinking through what new policies with ICE crackdowns and other things like that, how that is impacting the people who can get to farms and do this labor is really big. So of course, there’s this idea that people should follow the law and not come to the US illegally. I think there’s lots of different thoughts on that and I have my own, but if we’re just thinking about the law and legality, that’s it. There are specific ways to come into the US. However, in order to get our food supply as we want it, we rely on people who can’t advocate for themselves and can’t complain about unfair labor conditions and can’t do all of these other things for very real fear of being deported.

A lot of the estimates vary a lot, but some migrant laborers make a couple thousand dollars a year. I don’t know anyone in my social circle who would be willing to work for a couple thousand dollars a year. I don’t know many people in my social circle who would be willing to work for a couple thousand dollars a month. That’s just not a wage that is going to sustain a life that allows people to really excel and thrive. So wanting to provide work opportunities for people, for US citizens, for people here legally is great, but when we’re not providing work opportunities that actually provide people to thrive, we’re going to have challenges and we’re going to continue relying on migrant laborers.

Raj Daliboyina:

Yes. I think that’s a very basis of policy, right? There’s always going to be consequences of whichever policy you implement. And this is one of the consequences that has cropped up, I would say. Yeah. But do you think the workforce shortage, do you think it’s much more significant in the border states, but much less in inland states like Iowa? Or do you think it’s like across the mainland USA, it’s just that everyone is facing the same kind of shortage due to the policy changes?

Hannah Shultz:

I don’t actually have an answer to that. I know coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of complaint that people just don’t want to work anymore and that people got lazy. And my response to that was always, people don’t want to work shitty jobs. So if you’re offering to pay someone $7 an hour to do a really challenging job or a really dangerous job, people aren’t going to want to do that.

So I think we need to, when we think about labor shortages, my mind always goes to the worker. I have a very worker-centric bias. Why are people not wanting to work? This goes back to the nine whys. There’s people are going to do your job if you’re willing to pay them to do it, if you’re willing to provide the supports that are needed to support them in doing that. So I’m not a labor expert, so I don’t … I’m sure there are lots of people who have much more grounded responses than that, but my bias is always toward how can we support workers and how can we make sure that the jobs we do have and the jobs we are paying for are allowing the people to do them to have a decent life?

Raj Daliboyina:

And since the pandemic and post-pandemic, everything has been, there’s been so many ups and downs in policies and then that is affecting people, there’s like a lot … I would say there are like different kinds of disruptions since the pandemic, but the pandemic being the biggest one. What do you think about the timeline on this? Do you think these are like short-term disruptions that we’re going to be able to some clear up in the due course of time? Or do you think they’re going to be like longer structural issues in the whole food system because of all of these disruptions?

Hannah Shultz:

Oof. I don’t know, I think there’s some … Some of these challenges are already long-term challenges. Some of the disruptions have the ability to change things for a very long time. There are changes related to, like right now there are SNAP waivers are being approved all across the country and SNAP waivers are a way that states can implement SNAP differently. Like for example, Iowa just passed a SNAP waiver or just had a SNAP waiver approved that prohibits using SNAP dollars on any taxable food. That’s an interesting way, a creative way of disallowing things like soda and candy, but there’s other stuff that’s taxable that I think many of us would encourage people to buy regardless of if they’re using SNAP dollars or their own dollars. For example, like a fruit cup, if it has a utensil attached to it, that becomes taxable and you can’t buy it with SNAP. If there’s not a utensil attached to it, then you can buy it with SNAP. There’s lots of weird nuances happening here.

So these SNAP waivers, those changes can happen and change fairly rapidly. So the waivers have to be approved by USDA. So depending on who is in charge at any particular time, whether or not those waivers are approved will change. Right now, there are lots and lots of SNAP waivers being enacted across the country because the current administration is making rural development grants contingent upon SNAP waivers. It’s a way to … There’s a lot of money tied up in whether or not states are implementing these. So you’re seeing states that generally aren’t in favor of restricting SNAP purchases are actually implementing some of these waivers.

So I think those changes might be shorter term. I don’t know. Time will tell, but those can change. Other things like making policy about SNAP outside of the farm bill, that has the potential to really change how policy is made long term, which could have some pretty major long-term impacts.

This is all speculation right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Many of the things that have happened in the last five years, I wouldn’t have predicted, we’ll see.

One of the things that I mentioned earlier that has already had really long consequences and relating to your labor question is that farm workers and domestic workers are explicitly excluded from most labor laws. That is a holdover from when we were enslaving people. So at the time when labor laws were created, farm work and domestic work were often done by Black people who were formerly enslaved or their ancestors were formerly enslaved. So we excluded them from this work because we didn’t think that they needed the same protections as other people. So it was a way to put racism into policy without explicitly saying it was a racist policy, but the consequences of it and the impacts are.

So, many farm workers, some states have different laws that are stronger. Many farm workers across the country don’t have to be paid overtime. They don’t have many of the protections that other workers have, even if they are here with either legal permanent residency or they have citizenship. So there are lots of ways that we can impact policy that has centuries long consequences. And it will be really interesting now to see in the next five years, 10 years, 50 years, what policies that are being enacted stand the-

Raj Daliboyina:

Yeah. Things always have a compounding effect, right? Whether that’s policy or any short-term or long-term, there’ll always be some laws that are going to just get carried over and they get implemented easily, but they’re really hard to be taken off if they’re required to be taken off at some point.

But I love the fact that how you have said everything has been unpredictable in the last five years. Back home in my language, we have a very curious thing. We say, “Are you surprised?” And you do something and then you’re like, “Are you surprised after that?” So I think that’s what the last five to six years have been in general, all over the place, not just America in specific.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s it for part one of the conversation this week. A big thank you to Professor Hannah Shultz for joining and helping unpack the complex relationship between food prices, policy, and food access. In this episode, we explored how rising food costs, labor dynamics, and policy decisions like the farm bill and SNAP waivers are shaping food insecurity in ways that are often unpredictable, but deeply interconnected.

You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a colleague, friend, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team, you can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. And be sure to tune in next week for part two of this conversation. Until then, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.