Food Insecurity in Connecticut Needs to be Addressed

Helena Likus ’26

Staff Writer

As some of you might know, the legislative session in Connecticut has started — and honestly, I think you all should care about it. As a non-citizen, state politics in the US initially always felt kind of silly and insignificant to me in comparison with federal politics. However, with everything that is happening in the political sphere at the moment I have changed my mind. Funnily enough, Trump was always the one who was putting a lot of emphasis on state politics and now tries to impose everything on the federal level. Yet, the situation that should make me disillusioned with all political institutions only shifted my appreciation to the state government. Suddenly, I felt like an impostor for caring when in reality I should be planning my escape from the country whose administration doesn’t want me here. Yet, I find myself caring more than I ever did. So please, pay attention to what’s happening in the state that you spend the majority of your year in. 

If there is one issue that everyone who at least slightly cares about Connecticut’s community should follow, it is food insecurity. Let’s start off by acknowledging that the US doesn’t recognize food as a human right. The US was one of two countries (consider that Israel is the other) that voted against the UN committee draft that would instate the right to food. The justification that the US gave for such a vote was that food would require action, and that goes against skepticism toward government economic obligations. This disregard for economic obligations can surely explain why the US has significantly higher levels of food insecurity than other countries with a similar level of development. It also makes it clear that any concrete action taken on the federal level is unlikely, especially in conjunction with the current administration pulling and freezing federal funding from everything they can, including community health centers. 

Thus, we need to turn to state governments. For the record, Connecticut already has a plethora of programs that support people who are facing food insecurity, such as programs that offer free school lunches or food pantries. There are also a lot of independent non-profit organizations that do an amazing job supplying people with food, such as Connecticut Foodshare and Haven’s Harvest. However, there are a staggering 88 million meals required to end food insecurity in Connecticut, and the programs that are currently in place are unfortunately not sufficient in addressing the issue of food insecurity. 

As outlined in the Connecticut Foodshare, one in eight people in Connecticut experience food insecurity. This means more than 465,000 Connecticut residents struggle with hunger. Moreover, one in six children in Connecticut (16%) are food insecure. When I saw this statistic, I’m not going to lie, it made me slightly sick. To put this into perspective, Connecticut’s richest person’s net worth is almost 22 billion dollars. They live in Greenwich (obviously), where 10.7% of the population is food insecure. In Hartford, it’s 22.2% of the population. 

Since 2020, Connecticut has had the second highest per capita income in the US (previously the highest) and yet, 12.5% of people living in Connecticut are food insecure. This really goes to show how prevalent  economic inequality is in Connecticut. However, this opinion is not meant to be fully bleak. During this legislative session, there are a lot of hopeful bill proposals that are addressing the issue of food insecurity. This includes bills that aim to reimburse people for farmers market produce, expand access to free school meals and increase the budget tenfold for food banks in CT. Those are the bills that I will be surely following, maybe even testify for — and if you care, you should too. 

Usually when I talk (or even think) about non-radical politics, I get this overwhelming feeling that the reforms are not actually changing anything. Legislation is by default conservative, and it will always work to preserve itself, and instating reforms reinforces the status quo that in reality should be destabilized and challenged. I still largely subscribe to this view but there are certain issues that cannot wait for the system to change: they need to be addressed now, and I’m thankful that there are politicians in Connecticut who want to do something about it. 

What is maybe even greater is that on Trinity’s campus we have organizations like The Trinity Community Care ProjeConnecticut and Students Against Mass Incarceration, who care about this issue and work towards addressing it. I think you should too.