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Before my cancer "festivities" last year, I had conditioned my diet to 600 calories Monday/Thursday and 1250 on the other days. My weight was stable on that regimen. Daily protein target was 92 grams.

Since the Whipple, I have had a problem maintaining my weight. My duodenum is gone. My gallbladder is gone. The surgeon spared most of my pancreas. My weight dropped all the way to 136.4 from a pre-surgery 161.5. If I don't eat at least 2000 calories, I lose weight.

If I don't push to get back to 160, my prognosis is 28 to 32 months post June 2024. Post Whipple, I'm rarely hungry. My gut is perpetually inflamed. My recommended recovery input is 2500 to 3000 calories including 100 to 120 grams of protein daily. It's hard to even conceive of consuming that much food. I'm using Optimal Aminos and 3 grams daily of HMB to preserve muscle.

I did have some experience with hunger in 5th grade. We had a fairly meager budget for food as my parents paid back a salary advance used to purchase our home in Springfield, VA. My parents did a decent job of ensuring sufficient food.

According to the Census Bureau’s Household Survey, 88% of Americans feel “secure” about having enough food, and most of the remaining 12% could find adequate food through charities or government programs.

And yet what does the headline say?

Americans are struggling to afford enough food As of October 2023, 53.7% of American adults were able to access and afford the food they wanted all the time

That claim that 53.7% of American adults were able to access and afford the food they wanted all the time. itself is a specious basis for claiming "Americans are struggling to afford enough food." Just what constitutes "the food they wanted?" And then there is "all the time," meaning during the last year, sometimes I did not have enough money to but the expensive steak or ice cream I wanted?

As documented in this post, "Food insecurity" is a term contrived in order to promote the lie that there is widespread hunger in 42% obese, 73+% overweight America, using such questions as,

. "The food that we bought just didn't last and we didn't have money to get more." Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

98 percent reported that the food they bought just did not last and they did not have money to get more, which refers to whether 5.6% of households ever faced this during the past year, yet how just how long does "did not last food" cover, and how much of the food is in mind? Any family can claim that the milk, eggs, bread and other perishables that cost maybe $30 got used up, and over the course of 12 months it is not hard to find a time when you did not have money for shopping.
But by such contrived findings we see headlines such as

"Study finds nearly 25% of Americans are food insecure." (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-in-four-americans-food-insecure/)

And,

Almost 30 million Americans didn't have enough food to eat .(https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/31/us/food-insecurity-30-million-census-survey/index.html)

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A lesson on how to mislead with statistics:

The survey indicated that 3.0% of American adults “often” did not have enough to eat in the last week and 9.5% “sometimes” did not have enough food that October. Another 33.8% reported having enough food, but not always the kinds they wanted, while 53.7% could afford and access the kinds of food they wanted at all times.

3%+9.5%+33.8% = 46.13% which likely is what the category of "limited access to food" refers to:

Of respondents with limited access to food, the Household Pulse Survey indicates that 76.8% of people were not eating enough because they couldn’t afford to.

Yet,

Nearly half of adolescents and three-quarters of adults in the U.S. were classified as being clinically overweight or obese in 2021. The rates have more than doubled compared with 1990.

Without urgent intervention, our study forecasts that more than 80% of adults and close to 60% of adolescents will be classified as overweight or obese by 2050. These are the key findings of our recent study, published in the journal The Lancet. -https://theconversation.com/208-million-americans-are-classified-as-obese-or-overweight-according-to-new-study-synthesizing-132-data-sources-244185 Which indicates that despite limited access to food by less than half the US population (76.8% of 46%) all but 20% can be expected to be overweight or obese by 2050. Of course, this is blamed on 33.8% not always having the food they wanted.

Most Americans are in danger of having too much food rather than too little.

That being said, if our food supply chain were disrupted, America would crumble fast.

I believe ensuring food security (meaning food being available rather than “free”) is a major function of government. It is a form of national security.

Our modern supply chains have made food cheap and plentiful with lots of variety. But the downside is that it is vulnerable to disruptions which have the potential to be catastophic.