Who Is Making a Profit From Your Hunger?

by | May 30, 2026 | Money Over People

Photo by Nohe Pereira, Unsplash

Who Is Making a Profit From Your Hunger?

by | May 30, 2026 | Money Over People

Photo by Nohe Pereira, Unsplash

While Washington cuts $187 billion in food assistance, the protein and pharmaceutical industries collect federal checks and call it charity.

Republished with permission from Robyn O’Brien

I spent years on Wall Street learning to read a balance sheet. So let me read you this one.

The federal government just announced a $7.5 million investment through HHS to partner with HATCH for Hunger, a nonprofit that redirects surplus protein, eggs, chicken, beef, to food banks nationwide. The goal: improve health outcomes and reduce chronic disease. I’ve spent two decades making this exact argument. Real food. Nutrient-dense food.

Food that prevents illness rather than postponing it.

On its face, this is good. Now look at the other side of the ledger.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that H.R. 1 cuts SNAP by nearly $187 billion through 2034, the largest reduction in the program’s history. When fully implemented, 4 million people in a typical month will lose food assistance entirely or see it cut substantially. These are not future projections. SNAP participation has already fallen by more than 3.5 million people since the law was enacted in July 2025.

$7.5 million in. $187 billion out.

I’m not a political person. I’m an analyst. No analyst in the world, regardless of party, can look at those two numbers and call it a nutrition policy.

SNAP serves more than 40 million Americans each month, 16 million children, 8 million seniors, 4 million adults with disabilities. The science is unambiguous: food insecurity in early childhood causes lasting developmental harm.

Hunger and chronic disease are not separate problems.

They are the same problem in different clothes.

SNAP is also an economic engine. Every dollar in benefits generates $1.54 in economic activity. These cuts don’t just hurt families, they hurt the farmers, grocers, and local economies that depend on that spending. They create a massive unfunded mandate on state governments. Some states won’t be able to fill the gap. The downstream consequences are generational.

You cannot solve a hunger crisis with a charitable workaround while dismantling the floor beneath 40 million people.

That is not food policy. That is a press release.

Ask Who’s at the Table

Here’s what the press release didn’t lead with: HATCH for Hunger was founded by Jeff Simmons, the CEO of Elanco Animal Health, one of the world’s largest animal pharmaceutical companies, and he chairs its board today. The man announcing this federal nutrition partnership is simultaneously the head of a company that sells the drugs and growth products used in the protein supply chains HATCH promotes.

Look at the board: the former CEO of Tyson Foods. The co-founder of fairlife, now owned by Coca-Cola. The former CEO of Hilmar Cheese. The CEO of Zinpro Corporation. A former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. These are not hunger advocates who stumbled into food policy. These are the architects of the industrial protein supply chain, the same supply chain that benefits most from federal dollars flowing toward protein distribution and from Dietary Guidelines that emphasize animal protein.

The food is real. The need is real. But $7.5 million in federal funding, announced with fanfare while $187 billion in food assistance is stripped away, serves the industry’s story far more than it serves hungry families.

When the people most invested in selling protein are also running the nonprofit that distributes it and praising the government for funding it, that’s not charity.

That’s a vertically integrated PR campaign.

Farmers have a finely tuned radar for this kind of thing. They’ve seen too many Washington announcements that promise to help and end up serving someone else’s bottom line. I reached out to several after this announcement, and one put it plainly:

“It would be great to see investment in those types of programs. It’s going to take boots on the ground efforts and people making best use of those dollars … They upset the apple cart too much by messing with SNAP. How do we get more actual food grown in the United States? We show farmers how they can be more profitable working in tandem with nature and gradually transitioning away from government programs. Anytime the government says they are ‘here to help’ I am wary.”

– An American farmer

That farmer identified the real question: not how do we distribute more surplus protein, but how do we build a food system that grows more actual food, by farmers who can make a living doing it. The path forward is the transition she described, profitable, regenerative, nature-aligned, not more programs that entrench the status quo.

But none of that is possible if 4 million people lose their food assistance while we’re still building the alternative.

The MAHA Paradox

I believe the concern behind Make America Healthy Again is right. Real food. Less ultra-processing. More protein. Less chronic disease. Dietary Guidelines that prioritize nutrient-dense foods and call out highly processed foods represent progress.

But you cannot make America healthy again by making America hungry first.

SNAP is not a handout, it is the most cost-effective chronic disease prevention program the federal government has ever run.

Food insecurity is a clinical risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and mental illness. Every condition we claim we want to prevent.

When we cut the floor out from under 4 million people and hand them a charitable egg drive run by the executives who profit from selling eggs, we are not solving the problem.

We are rebranding it.

I didn’t become a food advocate because I stopped believing in markets. I became one because markets work best when they have honest information, and for too long, the true cost of our food system has been kept off the books. The hunger. The illness. The degraded soil. The farmer who can’t make a living without a government check. The family that can’t make rent and eat in the same week. Those costs are real, even when they don’t appear on a balance sheet.

$187 billion has been stripped from 40 million people and replaced with $7.5 million and a press release from the protein industry. What’s happening right now is what it looks like when a system optimizes for everything except the people it’s supposed to feed.

We can do better than this. But first, we have to be honest about what this is.

This is not food policy. This is a vertically integrated PR campaign for the protein industry.

Robyn O'Brien

Robyn O'Brien

Robyn O’Brien began her career as a financial analyst covering the food industry and later became one of the earliest voices identifying systemic risks and investment opportunities driven by shifts in consumer demand, health, and environmental pressures. She is a Fulbright fellow, adjunct professor at Rice University and the author of the award-winning book, The Unhealthy Truth, How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It, published by Random House in 2009.

She operates at the intersection of courage, innovation and what comes next.

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