Feeding America: I Am Hunger in America by Leo Burnett

Feeding America, the US's largest domestic hunger-relief and food rescue organization, has launched a Public Service Advertisement (PSA), “I am Hunger in America,” in partnership with the Ad Council and Leo Burnett.

The campaign aims to challenge public perception of who faces hunger domestically by combining artificial intelligence (AI), data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and real, current stories of food insecurity to create a face of hunger.

Feeding America curated over a thousand photos of people struggling with hunger from its member food bank archives using demographic data from the USDA’s food security report released in 2018. Leveraging AI, it then used these photos to generate a single face illustrative of the USDA data resulting in a data-driven representation of what hunger looks like in America. The project was launched in December 2018, and the entire process took about ten months to complete.

37 million people – including more than 11 million children – live in food-insecure households, per the latest USDA’s report released earlier this month. According to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap 2019 study, which provides local-level estimates of food insecurity across the United States, there is not one county that is hunger-free.