Understanding the effects of scarcity and uncertainty on the developing brain and behavior has been a major challenge for neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Currently, over millions of households with children and adolescents worldwide experience insecure and uncertain access to food, a.k.a. food insecurity. The goal of our work is to investigate if transient food insecurity experience during the juvenile-adolescent developmental period has lasting effects in adult learning, decision making, and dopamine system in a mouse model. We manipulated feeding schedules from postnatal day(P)21 to 40 as food insecure (FI) or ad libitum (AL) and returned them back to free access of diet after P41. We found that adult males in the FI and AL group showed significant differences in performance in the reversal phase of a deterministic 4-choice odor-based foraging task (4COF) and differed in ‘trials to switch’ in a 2-armed bandit task (2ABT) when probability of reward was 65-75% but not 90%. We then applied reinforcement learning models to further investigate how the two groups solved the tasks. The best fit models suggest that P21-40 feeding experience affected sensitivity to negative outcomes in both tasks, but the direction of effect was task specific. In separate cohorts of adult male FI and AL mice, we examined the synaptic plasticity of dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in ex vivo slices and evoked striatal dopamine release. We found that AMPAR/NMDAR ratio in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core-projecting VTA dopamine neurons and dopamine release in the dorsal striatum were significantly decreased in the FI group compared to the AL group. Together, these data show in a rodent model that transient differences in food scarcity and uncertainty in development can have significant impacts on adult learning, decision-making, and dopamine function.