US launches effort to end hunger by 2030 by expanding benefits and access to healthy foods

Jewell Market, the only store in a small community in central Iowa, closed in 2019. It served four communities within a 20-mile radius. Some of the town's residents created a cooperative to reopen the store. Photograph: Jack Kurtz/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

The Biden government has launched a new strategy to end hunger in the US by 2030 through the expansion of benefits such as free school meals and food stamps.

One in 10 households struggled to feed their families in 2021 due to poverty – an extraordinary level of food insecurity in the richest country in the world which has barely budged in the past two decades amid deepening economic inequalities and welfare cuts. Of those, children in 274,000 households went hungry, skipped meals or did not eat for entire days because there was not enough money to buy food.