Gaining real-time insight on food insecurity

Social media is a great tool for immediate feedback on emergency situations. To gain an understanding of issues surrounding access to adequate food and assess how people felt about their food situation, Pennsylvania State University rural sociology researchers and international colleagues analyzed Twitter posts during the pandemic.

Posts expressing anger, disgust or fear were strongly associated with actual food insufficiency in 12 states including California, Illinois, New York, Texas and Wisconsin. Words used to describe their food situations included “can’t afford groceries,” “food prices,” and “food shortage.” The assessment included more than 1.2 million tweets posted during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These findings could potentially be used to develop a low-cost early warning system for supply chain managers and policymakers to detect when and where localized food security problems are emerging in real-time.

Project supported by Hatch Multistate funds.