The word "food" was mentioned only twice in Tuesday’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Once, when moderator David Muir asked Trump if his proposed tariffs on foreign imports might affect the price of everyday items like food and medicine, and again when Trump, veering into divisive rhetoric, claimed without evidence that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, had started eating fellow residents’ pets.

“The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food,” Trump declared, invoking one of the GOP’s latest inflammatory and unfounded accusations against migrants.

The absence of substantive discussion on food policy was, in many ways, both notable and totally unsurprising. Just last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a report showing that 18 million families, or 13.5% of American households, faced food insecurity in 2023, the highest level in nearly a decade. Meanwhile, Harris has already divided the grocery industry over her promise to pass the first ever federal ban on price-gouging.

Yet, it quickly became clear that policy discussions would be secondary to performance last night, something Jon Stewart noted in his “The Daily Show” wrap-up of the debate: “After surviving the PTSD of the last presidential debate, how unbelievably refreshing it is to go back to the same old ‘nobody's gonna answer any f**cking questions!’”

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Still, concerns about hunger continue to plague the country, as the vast majority of Americans report feeling anxious about food inflation and as federal nutrition programs like WIC and SNAP are under consistent Republican fire despite a growing nationwide need for the services they provide. So, let’s flesh out a bit of what was actually discussed last night to better understand each candidates’ positions on major political flashpoints like the economy and immigration, and how those coincide with food.

Muir’s question to Trump........

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