(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The global food crisis is starting to hit home in a major way. Images of starving children on the other side of the planet don’t move people emotionally the way that they did in the 1980s and 1990s. Many people simply don’t care. But now hunger is spreading like wildfire in the United States and Canada.
If you can still afford to eat three meals a day on a consistent basis, you should be very grateful because 27 percent of Americans can’t. Those that are wealthy have a really difficult time understanding how soul crushing it can be to not have enough money for food. There are millions upon millions of people in the United States that are regularly going hungry, and that is one of the reasons why there is so much anger and frustration in our society right now.
I kept warning my readers that the primary way that the global food crisis would initially manifest in wealthy western countries would be through higher food prices.
Since the beginning of this decade, we have been trapped in a seemingly endless cost of living crisis. Food prices have soared, and that has made a trip to the grocery store very painful for most of us.
Now we have reached a stage where vast numbers of us can simply no longer afford to eat three meals a day.
In fact, one survey found that 27 percent of all U.S. adults are now skipping meals due to high food prices…
Intuit Credit Karma, which provides information about financial products, says that more than one-quarter of the people it surveyed said they have skipped meals or sacrificed other spending due to rising costs. The survey of 2,011 adults was conducted online in the United States during the week of May 7.
According to the survey, 28% said they are putting off paying for necessities, such as rent or other bills, to afford groceries — while 27% say they are occasionally skipping meals. Another 18% have applied for or have considered applying for food stamps and other types of assistance, and 15% rely on or have considered visiting food banks for their groceries.
(The most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that 41.2 million Americans per month are receiving federal food benefits, with the average participant getting $230.88 monthly.)
It is more common for Americans to skip lunch than it is for them to skip dinner.
A different survey discovered that 54 percent of all U.S. workers have skipped lunch “at least once a week” this year…
According to ezCater’s Lunch Report, 54% of US-based, full-time employees missed out on work lunch at least once a week in 2026. Researchers surveyed 1,000 US-based workers, and the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.
Robert Kaskel, vice president of people at ezCater, tells CNBC Make It that the percentage of workers skipping out on meals has increased consecutively for the past four years. In 2023, the first year ezCater conducted the survey, 48% of workers reported skipping one meal at work per week.
The majority of respondents, 81%, said that inflation caused them to change their eating habits at work and that they are responding to high food prices in a variety of ways. To cut costs, some buy out less frequently, resort to cheaper options, use discounts or loyalty programs, keep a strict budget, meal prep or forage for food at work.
Not everyone is skipping lunch for financial reasons.
Some people just get really busy and need to work through lunch.
But without a doubt, hunger is on the rise.
A survey of hourly restaurant employees in the United States found that 61 percent of them have “skipped more than one meal per week during the past month because they couldn’t afford food”…
Food prices have remained elevated for more than three years, while the cost of dining out continues to climb. For the millions of hourly employees who keep the restaurant industry running, those higher costs are taking a measurable toll.
According to the 2026 State of Hourly Restaurant Workers Study, 61% of hourly restaurant employees surveyed said they skipped more than one meal per week during the past month because they couldn’t afford food. The national survey, commissioned by Instant Financial and conducted by the Center for Generational Kinetics, polled 750 hourly restaurant employees between March 3 and March 31. Results were weighted to reflect the U.S. Census by age, region, gender, and geography. The survey also found that 75% of respondents are living paycheck to paycheck, a figure that rises to 83% among restaurant employees not in management roles.
61 percent.
Just think about that.
Restaurant work has never paid very well.
But now most of them don’t even make enough to eat three meals a day.
This is what life is like in America in 2026 for millions of people.
But they aren’t rich or famous and so they will never get on television.
In Canada, conditions are even worse…
Survey results show that 31% of Canadians skipped or reduced meals due to grocery costs, rising from 27% in 2025. Concurrently, use of community food support services grew from 11% to 15%.
If you are Canadian or you have been to Canada lately, you are probably well aware of how shocking the food prices in Canada have become.
Sadly, young adults are being hit harder than anyone else…
Younger adults are feeling it most. Young adults face disproportionate pressure, with 41% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 skipping or downsizing meals and 23% accessing community food programs.
When you can’t afford to eat three meals a day, you are impoverished.
I know that may sound blunt, but it is the truth.
The standard of living for most people has been going down, and demand at food banks has soared all over the nation in 2026…
An NBC News survey this month of 48 of the largest food banks — representing 35 states and Washington, D.C. — found that nearly three-quarters reported increases in the number of people coming to their sites over the past year.
A lot of food banks regularly run out of food because the demand is now so great.
At this stage, close to half of the entire country struggles to pay for even the basic essentials…
Almost half of Americans struggle to pay for at least one of their basic needs, a study by the Pew Research Center found. Nearly three-quarters of lower-income adults reported difficulty covering the cost of groceries, housing, medical care or daily transportation.
If conditions are this dire now, what will things look like once economic conditions get far worse?
As we rapidly approach 2027, the pace of large corporate layoffs is really starting to pick up.
For example, it appears that Disney is about to conduct their largest round of layoffs yet…
Disney is planning to cut several thousand jobs, people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
Some managers at the entertainment giant have been asked to reduce costs by up to 20%, according to the people, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
It marks the latest round of layoffs since CEO Josh D’Amaro took the reins earlier this year. The update comes after separate plans in April to cut as many as 1,000 employees, predominantly in the marketing department, and in September to cut about 300 employees, many in human resources and technology divisions.
Every time another good paying job is eliminated, another American worker is in danger of falling out of the middle class.
The middle class in this country has been steadily eroding for decades, and now that steady erosion is threatening to become a collapse.
I have been ranting about the evisceration of the middle class for nearly two decades, but it didn’t seem to do much good.
The experts kept assuring us that everything was going to be okay, but here in 2026 everything is most definitely not okay.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
