Early one morning in mid-November, Trisha Cunningham, the president of North Texas Food Bank, arrived at a sprawling fairground in southern Dallas that hosts the annual Texas State Fair. Four lines of cars snaked for miles, from the entrance toward the skyscrapers downtown. Some of the drivers had arrived the night before and slept in their cars, waiting for a box of food that would help get them through Thanksgiving.

By the end of this year, more than 50 million people could experience food insecurity, according to Feeding America, the country’s largest hunger-relief organization. That’s one in six Americans and one in four children—nearly a 50 percent increase from 2019. A Northwestern University study in June found that food needs