No, it's harvest season, the fall season sale period, first buy on cheap soup. To have a second buy on cheap soup a month later that cheap isn't normal, more likely due to over inventory from the SNAP shutdown. The to much inventory doesn't always work as an excuse because one would have to explain why hams are always just plentiful and cheap around Christmas or Easter, or Turkeys at Thanksgiving, actually the cheapest time to buy bacon is between Xmas and Easter also, or how is it that hamburger is just cheap and plentiful during the summer holidays, any other time you pay though the nose for those items. Big Ag controls and manages all that but in the end, people get what they want the most at certain times of the year, and most are happy with that evidently. I am not, but I am not so unhappy I'd rather dig up my yard, and take on feeding chickens, no, buying a freezer goes a long ways in storing up food. I still have one turkey left I bought last year and gave another one to a family member tonight, a couple to my other son over the last couple months. I'll still buy more this year, just not as many as I'd rather have more room for beef sales than turkey sales. Those turkeys take up a lot of space. No one ever starves around this city, in this instant, people rose to the occasion, usually they'd go to a food bank, or the two meals served twice a day at a place called God's Kitchen. We don't live in the wild west anymore, everyone having a garden isn't going to happen for a matrix of reasons, and farm produced meat products would never go over well with farm animals shitting everywhere. It's bad enough people don't clean up after their dogs. Once winter hits, the snow melts, you think all that dog crap in people's backyards stink, just wait until a winter worth of farm animal waste is whiffing through your windows. Anyone with any type of a yard big enough to grow their own food supply who doesn't op to, shouldn't get any food, well, who the hell is anyone making those dictates onto people who'd rather just go buy their food. Sounds worse than the government dictates, do it or starve.
Why the government also allows the food market to function as it does, is because it creates millions of jobs, not all of them paying well enough to provide everything that a family needs, but what they pay out in helping those families, they get back more so, that's the part they don't tell people because it keeps people divided, which is their main function and goal while they haul in billions off tax revenues, food is not tax only at the point of sale, every other aspect involved in it's manufacture is, including off the profits of those manufacturing it. So unless something happens that sends us back to the 1800's, there's not going to be any chicken coop, or sheep, cow, pig hanging out in the backyard. Though I still have some tomatoes downstairs in the kitchen window I grew this summer ripening up the last few, other than that and some peppers, I can hang knowing when to stock instead of grow.
Like you said, no one really knows what Trump is up to, though at this point, probably no good, but I'd take a guess this whole government shutdown allowed them to update government software than DODG uploaded on unsecure servers and walked out with, and SNAP, well, it wasn't at a place they could do that with it up running functional but I think if that is the reason it will be the first telling sign if they were as fraud reports will become a common thing for awhile as more people get caught.