More than half of LGBTQ+ adults in a Massachusetts survey ran short of food in 2024, up from 44% two years earlier. Their use of food pantries didn't move

Running short of food is usually counted by household income, by race, by postcode. It is counted far less often by who people are. A study published on 8 October 2026 in JAMA Network Open did that count in Massachusetts, a state with more food help and more legal protection for LGBTQ+ people than most of the United States, and found a gap that has been there every year the survey has looked.

The numbers come from the Massachusetts Statewide Food Access Survey, run each year by the Greater Boston Food Bank with researchers at Mass General Brigham. The team behind the new paper, from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard and the food bank itself, pooled three rounds: 3,024 adults in 2022, 3,014 in 2023 and 3,136 in 2024, 9,174 in all. People were recruited online through research panels, with low-income households deliberately over-represented, and the answers were then weighted to match the state's adult population. Between 10% and 13% of respondents each year were LGBTQ+, meaning they gave a sexual orientation other than straight or a gender other than only man or only woman.

Food insecurity was measured with the US Department of Agriculture's standard 10 questions about the past year: worrying food would run out, skipping meals, going hungry because there wasn't money. By that measure, 43.7% of LGBTQ+ adults were food insecure in 2022, 50.9% in 2023 and 54.9% in 2024. For everyone else the figure went from 29.8% to 33.3%. Both rises were statistically real, and they were about the same size, so the gap neither closed nor widened. It just stayed.

Some of that gap is about money and age. The LGBTQ+ adults in the survey were much younger (43% were under 35, against 15% of the others) and more than a quarter lived on less than $25,000 a year. But when the researchers accounted for age, race, where people lived, education, income and employment, LGBTQ+ adults were still 26% more likely to be food insecure in 2024. When the group was split up, bisexual adults had the highest rate, 60.9%, though the subgroups were too small to compare with any confidence.

The part worth a second look is what happened to food help. While need among LGBTQ+ adults rose by about 11 points, the share using a food pantry in the past year didn't change: 32.6%, 31.5%, 32.8%. Use of SNAP, the federal grocery benefit once known as food stamps, went from 37.3% to 43.9%, a change the authors count as stable. Either way, by 2024 more than half were food insecure, and neither programme was reaching half of them.

The survey asked people what got in the way. Among LGBTQ+ adults who weren't on SNAP in 2024, 45.6% said they didn't know if they were eligible (against 25.7% of others), 44.6% worried about taking benefits from someone who needed them more (28.6%), and 38.2% feared being identified as a SNAP user (20.7%). Among those who didn't use a pantry, 37.4% said they would feel embarrassed and 29.1% said it was hard to travel to. Those already using pantries complained mostly about what every pantry user complains about: long lines, limits on how often you can come, shelves that run out. One answer is worth noting because it didn't differ: about one in six pantry users said they didn't feel welcome, and that share was much the same for LGBTQ+ adults (17.2%) and everyone else (15.1%).

Asked what would bring them to a pantry more often, LGBTQ+ adults picked the options with the least queueing and the least visibility: grocery gift cards (42.5%, against 25.7% of others), home delivery (42.4% against 26.0%) and online ordering (34.0% against 21.0%).

There are limits to what this can tell us. The survey reaches people through online panels and fills quotas, which is not a random sample, however carefully it's weighted. That may be one reason even the comparison group's rate, about one in three, is high next to other US estimates; the paper itself notes these range from 10.5% to 36.0% depending on how you ask. Each round is a fresh set of people, so nobody was followed over time. The barrier questions were general ones put to everyone, not questions about treatment as an LGBTQ+ person, so the study shows that embarrassment and uncertainty are more common in this group without showing where they come from. Only about 420 LGBTQ+ adults answered in 2024, which leaves wide margins on every figure. And it is one state. The authors say the picture may not carry over to places with weaker food programmes or fewer protections, and there is little reason to expect it to look better there.

The practical point is a modest one. In this survey the gap wasn't mainly about pantries turning people away. It was about people not knowing whether they qualified, not wanting to be seen, and deciding someone else needed it more. Those are things an eligibility checker, a delivery slot or a gift card can address, and the authors say such approaches now need to be tested properly.