United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs

The United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was a select committee of the United States Senate between 1968 and 1977. It was sometimes referred to as the McGovern committee, after its only chairman, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.

The impetus for formation of the committee was a rising concern about hunger and malnutrition in the United States. It had been brought to public attention by the 1967 field trip of Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph S. Clark to see emaciated children in Cleveland, Mississippi, by the 1967 broadcast of the CBS News special Hunger in America, and by the 1968 publication of Citizens Crusade Against Poverty's report Hunger USA. The last of which showed that diseases such as kwashiorkor and marasmus – thought only to exist in underdeveloped countries – were present in America.

Existing Senate and House committees were uninterested in pursuing the issue, with House Agriculture Committee chairman William R. Poage saying "The basic problem is one of ignorance as to what constitutes a balanced diet, coupled with indifference by a great many persons who should and probably do not know," and Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Allen Ellender saying "I know that in my state we had a number of fishermen who were unable to catch fish. Do you expect the government, because they cannot catch fish, to feed them until the fish are there?" Political activist Robert B. Choate, Jr. first came up with the idea of forming a joint congressional committee to probe the hunger problem. McGovern, who had been involved in food-related issues throughout his congressional career and who had been Director of Food for Peace in the Kennedy administration during the early 1960s, thought that confining the committee to just the more liberal Senate would produce better chances for action. McGovern gathered 38 co-sponsors for the committee's creation, a resolution quickly passed the Senate, and McGovern was named the committee's chairman in July 1968. However, the Senate Rules Committee gave essentially no funding to it that year, so it was inactive; in February 1969, McGovern successfully battled the Rules Committee to restore the normally allocated funding and the select committee's operations began.

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