In September 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) quietly ended its annual food security report. For nearly 30 years, the survey had been the country’s primary tool for understanding who was going hungry and where — a benchmark that influenced billions in federal funding and that researchers, policymakers, and advocates in every state relied on. Its cancellation has left a void no one has figured out how to fill.
But even before the report disappeared, a growing body of research was exploring what the survey didn’t capture. The USDA measured, almost exclusively, whether people could afford enough food. It did not ask whether the right food was available in their neighborhood, whether they had the means to prepare it, whether they had any real say in what they ate, or whether the food system itself could keep feeding them a generation from now.
Those are the questions a small state office in New Jersey had spent the last three years trying to answer. Working with researchers and community organizations, it built a measurement system that assesses food security across six dimensions rather than one. Those dimensions — affordability, availability, utilization, stability, agency, and sustainability — together capture whether people can pay for food, whether appropriate food exists nearby, whether they can prepare it, whether access holds over time, whether they have choice and voice in the system, and whether that system itself can keep providing. Their findings challenge basic assumptions about how to measure food security and what it means to strengthen it. And now, with other states grappling with what comes next, New Jersey has built something that could become a model for the rest of the country.
The Research That Reframed a State’s Approach to Food Security
For as long as the United States has tracked food security, affordability has been the lens. Every December, the USDA administered a supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, asking up to 18 questions of roughly 40,000 households. The questions were about money, and the answers shaped how the country understood the problem and what it built to solve it.
Dr. Jenny Schrum, now the Director of Research and Evaluation Strategy at New Jersey’s Office of the Food Security Advocate (OFSA), started questioning that framing during her PhD in social work at Rutgers. Studying food security measurement, she found herself returning to the definition of food security adopted by the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security, which describes it as a condition where all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The USDA survey measured one critical piece of that definition well, economic access, but left much of the rest untouched: food quality, cultural appropriateness, whether people had any power over their food choices, or whether the system feeding them was sustainable. “We always associate food security with money, which is incredibly salient, but not the whole story,” Schrum said. “If people have enough money, it may give you access. But there are many reasons people are food insecure.”
Her research led her to the work of Dr. Eric Calloway at the Center for Nutrition and Health Impact (CNHI), a national nonprofit developing survey measures for three dimensions of food security the USDA wasn’t capturing: availability, whether appropriate food physically exists in someone’s environment; utilization, whether people have the equipment, skills, and knowledge to prepare it; and stability, whether access holds up over time through job losses, benefit lapses, or disasters.
Then in 2020, the UN’s High Level Panel of Experts published a report arguing that two additional dimensions had been missing from the food security conversation all along: agency, whether people have meaningful choice over what they eat and a voice in shaping the food system around them; and sustainability, whether the system itself can keep functioning for future generations. A 2022 paper by Dr. Jennifer Clapp at the University of Waterloo made the formal case that all six dimensions together were necessary to capture the full scope of food security. That same year, Schrum joined the newly created OFSA.
The office was the first and only state-level food security office in the country housed within a governor’s office with its own dedicated budget, team, and legislative mandates. Created through legislation under Governor Murphy and Speaker Coughlin, it was charged with coordinating outreach across the state’s food security programs, identifying best practices, and developing new initiatives to increase enrollment and outcomes. Its Executive Director, Mark Dinglasan, had spent years on the front lines of hunger-relief work, most recently leading CUMAC, the largest food bank and social services organization in Passaic County. He saw the office’s creation as a direct response to gaps the pandemic had made impossible to ignore. “Advocates from various sectors, including philanthropy, called for an office that could help bridge those gaps and create greater resilience,” he said. Placing it within the governor’s office was intended to give it agility and the ability to not just gather information and convene partners, but to act on what it found.
The mandate didn’t take long to take shape. At one of Schrum’s first meetings at OFSA, Calloway was in the room. “I was like, I just cited your dimension work in my dissertation,” she recalled. That meeting opened a door. Together, Schrum, Dinglasan, and Calloway began collaborating on what would become OFSA’s first major research project: developing survey measures for all six dimensions, building on Calloway’s existing work on the first four and extending it to capture agency and sustainability for the first time. New Jersey would be where that framework was put to the test.
For Dinglasan, adopting the framework was a leap. “Big goals and big dreams are scary,” he said. “You are hinging an entire state initiative on something that has never been done before.” But when Schrum presented him with the six-dimensions framework, it clicked. It aligned with the guiding principle he had submitted to the governor’s office when he took the role, that OFSA must care, collaborate, convene, and when necessary, create. The framework gave that principle a structure. And because it had never been used to build out an entire state initiative before, it also gave the office something rare: the flexibility to build consensus as it went, rather than arrive with answers already fixed.
What New Jersey Measured and What the Data Showed
New Jersey is not an obvious place to lead a national rethinking of food security measurement. But it had something almost no other state did: a dedicated office with the mandate, the budget, and now the framework to ask harder questions than the federal government ever had. An estimated 1.1 million residents experienced food insecurity in 2023, according to Feeding America, a rate that had been climbing steadily. That figure was based on the old way of measuring, focused almost entirely on affordability. OFSA, working with CNHI, set out to find what a fuller picture would show.
From January to July 2025, they partnered with Qualtrics and community organizations to reach more than 2,000 New Jersey residents. The sample included a statewide representative group of 974 people and an oversample of 1,054 from nine communities with high rates of food insecurity, including Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Paterson, and Trenton, recruited through food pantries, shelters, and resource hubs. Five dimensions were measured using standardized survey questions that had been tested and refined through prior research, with results scored from 0 to 100. Sustainability was assessed separately. Because questions about the long-term viability of farming and supply chains require system-level knowledge rather than personal experience, CNHI surveyed 61 food system experts across the state rather than residents.
The full findings are documented in Exploring the Six Dimensions of Food Security in New Jersey, published in October 2025 in partnership with CNHI. An interactive dashboard accompanying the report lets readers explore results across all five surveyed dimensions broken down by geography, age, income, language, household composition, and participation in federal nutrition programs like SNAP and WIC. Higher scores indicate more favorable outcomes.
The results confirmed some expectations and challenged others, highlighting gaps in how food insecurity has been understood and addressed.
Affordability, as expected, remained a profound barrier to food access. But measuring the other dimensions revealed problems the USDA survey would never have surfaced. Many residents reported that healthy and culturally appropriate food simply wasn’t available in their local stores, and even less so in food pantries. Others had access to food they couldn’t actually use, lacking kitchen equipment, storage, or the time and skills to prepare meals. And for many households, food insecurity wasn’t triggered by a single crisis like a job loss or a medical emergency. It was a recurring pattern: money running out before the end of the month, benefits lapsing, seasonal work drying up, food access breaking down and recovering and breaking down again.
Among the most striking findings, however, were those on agency. The survey measured it in two ways: whether people felt they could choose food that matched their needs and preferences, and whether they felt they could participate in shaping the food system around them, through things like advocating for healthier school meals or having input on local food policy. On both measures, scores were among the lowest of any dimension. People’s sense that they could influence the food system scored just 33 out of 100 statewide. In the nine communities oversampled for their high rates of food insecurity, it dropped to 19.2.
The lowest scores belonged to parents and caregivers, non-English speakers, younger adults, and people who use SNAP, WIC, and food pantries. In other words, the people most connected to the food assistance system reported the least ability to make choices within it or shape it. That finding cuts to the heart of how food assistance is designed. A program that feeds people but gives them no choice over what they eat and no voice in how the system works may be solving one problem while quietly entrenching another.
“If we’re measuring food security only by whether someone physically has food in their hand, you can resolve it by just putting food in someone’s hand,” Schrum said. “But if you look at the definition holistically, that isn’t food security.”
The problem, she argues, starts with how success is measured. “We operate on outputs, pounds, number of meals,” she said. “If that’s the only way we’re evaluating the work, it doesn’t leave room to get the extra resources or the motivation to deliver services differently. There’s no incentive to change if we’re only counting one type of evaluation.”
Those five dimensions – affordability, availability, utilization, stability, and agency – all focus on people’s direct experiences with food. The sixth asks something fundamentally different. Not whether individuals can access food today, but whether the food system itself will still be capable of producing and delivering it in a generation. Answering that question required a different methodology entirely.
Rather than surveying residents, CNHI asked 61 food system experts across New Jersey to assess the long-term health of the state’s agricultural and distribution infrastructure. Their answers were striking. When asked to identify the most urgent priorities for sustaining the food system’s ability to keep providing food security for future generations, four of the top five were about producers and infrastructure, not consumer-side access. Reducing the cost of growing food was flagged by 93 percent of experts, the single highest-rated issue. Supporting underrepresented farmers, protecting farm operations in extreme weather, and helping farmers adapt to climate change all ranked above 77 percent.
Those findings point to a supply-side crisis that food security policy has been slow to reckon with. New Jersey has already lost 27 percent of its agricultural land since 1982, according to the American Farmland Trust, and is ranked the third most threatened state in the country for farmland loss. If that trajectory continues, whether people can afford groceries may become secondary to whether the groceries will be there to buy at all. Farm economics, climate resilience, workforce sustainability, and farmland loss are not the issues that typically drive food security policy conversations, but they may be among the most important.
For Schrum, the sustainability data also expands what agency means in the food security conversation, pushing it beyond the consumer and up the supply chain. “Are we supporting young farmers to use different farming practices and come to different markets without having to cut their prices just to participate?” she said. “When we do, it gives them agency to grow different products that might address different demand. Agency applies at every stage of the food system, not just to the person at the end of the line.”
Taken together, the resident survey and the expert assessment give New Jersey a layered understanding of food security that captures both lived experience and system-level risk. Both sit within a broader measurement ecosystem OFSA has been assembling. The Statewide Food Insecurity Index, built by the Trenton Health Team with OFSA support, adds another layer by using Census demographic and economic indicators to estimate food insecurity at the neighborhood level. Rather than relying on county or state averages, policymakers can see where need may be concentrated block by block and target resources more precisely. That granular, multidimensional view of food insecurity became the foundation for what came next.
A Statewide Strategy Built on Better Data
Collecting that data was only the first step. The harder work was figuring out how to use what it revealed to actually address food insecurity. For OFSA, that meant building the community relationships that could turn research into a plan with real reach.
For Dinglasan, that meant showing up. Not from behind a desk or a report, but in community. “Centering community in the work doesn’t mean you do some research and design a program around it,” he said. “It means you physically show up. You break bread with the leaders doing the hard work and the heart work. You listen, really listen, and don’t say a word. Then you go back, advocate, deliver on promises, and connect people who are doing similar work but don’t have time to find each other.”
Two years of that work culminated in OFSA’s first annual food security summit in October 2024. “The energy and engagement in that room told us we had built enough of a foundation to start the strategic planning process,” Dinglasan said. “By the end of that day, I told the Governor’s office we were ready to begin.”
In February 2026, that process produced the New Jersey Food Security Strategic Plan, a three-year framework co-developed with partners across sectors to guide coordinated action on food security statewide. Rather than prescribing specific solutions, it gives direction while inviting communities to tailor implementation to their own contexts and needs.
The plan is organized around five focus areas, each targeting a different aspect of food insecurity. The first is data: building shared infrastructure across agencies so organizations can identify who is most affected and respond proactively. The second is food infrastructure and market development, with investments in transportation, food hubs, urban farms, and local procurement, with particular attention to small and historically excluded farmers. The third is local partnerships, supporting county-level food coalitions, culturally tailored outreach, and multi-benefit hubs where residents can access food and social services in one place. The fourth works to remove the bureaucratic barriers that keep eligible residents from enrolling in SNAP, WIC, school meals, and other programs, through simplified applications and referral networks across healthcare, housing, and workforce systems. The fifth addresses the long-term supply side directly: climate-resilient farming, disaster preparedness for food distribution networks, and the integration of food security into climate action planning. The five areas are designed to work together, a recognition that food insecurity cannot be solved by tackling any single aspect in isolation.
To help translate that shared vision into action, OFSA released an accompanying Strategic Plan Implementation Planning Toolkit. While designed for New Jersey, it is practical enough to be useful to anyone working on food security, whether starting something new or strengthening work already underway. It walks users through developing a plan from the ground up: defining the need, selecting a strategy, sketching out activities, building a logic model, and mapping out roles and timelines. Each step comes with customizable templates and real-world examples drawn from food security efforts already underway across New Jersey. For Dinglasan, it fills a gap he knew firsthand from his years leading a food bank. “I see multiple ways that this resource would have benefitted my team and I,” he said.
Strategic plans like this are not unique to New Jersey. New York City released Food Forward NYC, a 10-year food policy plan, in 2021, and has published progress reports every two years since. Seattle, Vermont, and North Carolina have developed their own as well. What is rare is a strategic plan grounded in the kind of multidimensional measurement infrastructure New Jersey has built underneath it. That infrastructure matters especially now.
The Federal Data Vacuum
When the USDA stopped producing its annual food security report in September 2025, most states found themselves without any way to track food insecurity on their own. A few have partial alternatives, including surveys in Massachusetts and California and a single question embedded in Colorado’s state health survey, but none amount to a comprehensive measurement system.
New Jersey was better positioned than almost any other state. But even Schrum is clear-eyed about what can’t be recovered. The USDA survey, for all its limitations, gave the country a common yardstick. Researchers could compare food insecurity in Mississippi to food insecurity in Oregon and know they were measuring the same thing. That is now gone. “We’re never going to be able to replace a longstanding federal study,” she said. “Not being able to look back in time and compare to the current year is a real problem.”
Without a shared instrument, states building their own systems will produce numbers that can’t be meaningfully compared, making it harder to allocate federal resources, track national trends, or identify where need is greatest. If states measure different things, they’ll design policy around different understandings of the problem. A state that measures only affordability may never invest in benefit programs. One that measures all six dimensions might also invest in food infrastructure, farmer support, and climate resilience. Both will call their work “food security,” but they could end up addressing fundamentally different problems with no way to learn from each other’s results.
That fragmentation is a real risk. But it has also created an opening. Other states have already reached out to OFSA to learn about its approach. “Many of our conversations these days are about sharing best practices on how we are weathering this time of uncertainty as federal policies continue to shift,” Dinglasan said. “New Jersey’s role in the broader national conversation is to inspire a more holistic narrative of how we build food security, and to share our process for building a community of practice that can take theoretical principles and execute practical applications that result in policy change.”
Schrum sees the same opening. “There’s a lot more buy-in from policymakers and philanthropy now that I didn’t have a year or two ago,” she said. “Sometimes you need a real cause to bring people to the table. The silver lining is that this moment has created space for conversations that were much harder to have before.”
Moving From Counting Meals to a More Ambitious Vision
Underlying New Jersey’s approach, the measurement, the planning, the coalition building, is a fundamental reassessment of how the food security field has long thought about itself. For decades, Schrum argues, it has operated from a scarcity mindset, designing programs around the assumption of perpetual shortage, measuring success by the narrowest possible metrics, and treating hunger as a problem to be contained rather than a system to be transformed. Count the meals. Count the pounds. Declare progress. When you define the problem narrowly, you build narrow solutions. You fund emergency responses year after year without asking why the emergency never ends. “If we just keep doing the same thing, we can’t expect to see a dramatic change,” Schrum said. “The scarcity mindset isn’t just about resources. It’s about imagination.”
The six-dimensions framework is what that bigger imagination looks like in practice. By naming six dimensions instead of one, it reframes food security as a problem that requires more than emergency response, and in doing so draws sectors to the table that were never in the room before: agriculture alongside healthcare, education alongside philanthropy, farmers alongside food banks. “Ten years ago, without this framework, there would be maybe two sectors in the room,” Schrum said. “Now think about the amount of resources, knowledge, and political will that adds.”
A scarcity mindset keeps that room small. A broader framework fills it, and fills it differently. That means including not just new sectors but the community members and families experiencing food insecurity firsthand. “Families are the single greatest experts on their needs and wants,” Dinglasan said, “and those of us with the power to effect change need to care about being taught by those families.” By capturing more of people’s lived experience, the six-dimensions framework allows community members and advocates to see themselves in the work and see each other in it, their efforts recognized rather than collapsed into a single metric.
For Schrum, those changes in who is at the table and what gets measured are all in service of a deeper goal: moving from emergency response to something more ambitious – a field capable of addressing food insecurity more comprehensively. “With inflation, a changing economy, and climate change reshaping what we can grow and where, food insecurity is going to affect far more people than it does today,” she said. “If we only ever respond to the emergency, we never address what’s causing it. Better definitions, better data, better program design, that’s how we start to get ahead of it.”
The broader lesson from New Jersey may be less about the specific tools it built than the shift in thinking that made them possible. For states and cities now confronting the federal data vacuum, New Jersey’s experience offers a starting point, not a template to copy, but evidence that a different framework produces a fundamentally different understanding of the problem, and that a different understanding leads to different action. Whether the rest of the country follows remains an open question. But in at least one state, the gap between what America has long been measuring and what food security actually means has been named, measured, and turned into a plan for action.
