CBS’s “Hunger in America” - The Hunger Museum: A Virtual Project of MAZON

Today, a staggering number of Americans struggle to put food on the table. The Hunger Museum is a unique and powerful exploration of how we got here and how we can end hunger.
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The Hunger Museum Tour We Can Solve Hunger — The Proof is in Our History

Hunger in America

Take a minute to watch a short clip of this documentary here. The full documentary detailed the terrible levels of hunger and malnutrition that existed across the country in the 1960s, and took legislators to task for feeding only 5 of the estimated 15 million hungry Americans at the time through the still-nascent Food Stamps program.

This combination of activists and the media together made visible how pervasive and how systemic hunger was, and succeeded in once again shifting the narrative about why people were struggling in this country. Just as it had during the Great Depression, the American public began to demand government intervention to address widespread, systemic hunger.

Where is it located in the Museum?

Televising the War on Hunger

“Hunger in America.” 1968. © CBS News.

The 1968 broadcast of Hunger in America returned hunger to the center stage in American politics. References to hunger had been part of the War on Poverty and the Poor People’s Campaign, but the CBS documentary exposed malnutrition as an aspect of everyday life. The program detailed the harmful effects of malnutrition on children’s physical and cognitive development, introducing an 11-year-old child forced into sex work to feed her family, and overturning the fallacy that all malnourished people are skinny. Hunger in America also emphasized the shortcomings of the Food Stamp Program, which fed only 5 million out of the estimated 15 million hungry people in the country. Personal stories added moral and emotional weight to the documentary, providing a shocking yet vital education about the persistence of hunger. And it roused viewers to take action, including a bipartisan array of legislators ranging from liberal Senator George McGovern to conservative Senator Robert Dole.