Under the umbrella of the Groceries for Writers project, Humanitas launched a survey with the intention of learning more about food insecurity in the screenwriting community. The survey was run in 2023 and then was expanded and re-run in 2024. Across both years, several hundred writers anonymously responded to the survey, answering questions about their career, the type of writing they do, guild status, demographic information, and their experience with food insecurity.
This report analyzes these responses. It includes an executive summary, and a preface framing food insecurity as a public issue and its downstream impacts, potentially existential, on the film and television industries.
In 2024, we found:
85.7% of those working as production staff/support staff said that they were worried about having enough food at least rarely
82.7% of staff writers said that they were worried about having enough food at least rarely
72.9% of Producer-level writers said that they were worried about having enough food at least rarely
62.5% of the Executive Producer-level writers said that they were worried about having enough food at least rarely
81.8% of feature writers said that they were worried about having enough food at least rarely