Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Based on Wikipedia: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

The Bridge Across the Chasm

In the 1930s, a federal administrator named Milo Perkins described a strange American paradox. "We got a picture of a gorge," he said, "with farm surpluses on one cliff and under-nourished city folks with outstretched hands on the other. We set out to find a practical way to build a bridge across that chasm."

That bridge became food stamps.

Today, we call the program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. But most Americans still use the old name, even though actual stamps haven't existed for over two decades. The program now serves roughly 40 million people through electronic benefit cards that work like debit cards at grocery stores. It's the largest nutrition program in the United States, and one of the most significant pieces of the American social safety net.

But the story of how we got here—from paper coupons printed by the same government bureau that prints dollar bills, to the modern electronic system—reveals something deeper about American politics, agriculture, race, and our complicated relationship with helping the poor.

When Farmers Had Too Much and Families Had Nothing

The Great Depression didn't just cause unemployment. It created a peculiar economic nightmare where abundance and starvation existed side by side.

Farmers were growing more food than they could sell. Without buyers, crops rotted in fields or were destroyed to try to prop up prices. Meanwhile, millions of unemployed Americans couldn't afford to eat. The marketplace had completely broken down—there was plenty of food, just no way for hungry people to get it.

This wasn't just a humanitarian crisis. It was a political problem for farmers who wanted fair prices for their labor and for a federal government trying to stabilize a collapsing economy. Food stamps emerged as a solution to both problems at once. The poor would get food. Farmers would get customers. The economy would get a boost.

The program worked through a clever system of colored stamps. If you were on government relief, you could buy orange stamps equal to what you'd normally spend on food. For every dollar of orange stamps you purchased, you'd receive fifty cents worth of blue stamps for free. The catch? Orange stamps worked anywhere, but blue stamps could only buy what the government classified as "surplus produce"—things like beans, eggs, and fruit that farmers couldn't otherwise sell.

This wasn't charity in the pure sense. It was economic engineering, designed to move agricultural products that would otherwise go to waste.

A Brief Experiment Ends

The first food stamp program ran for nearly four years, reaching about 20 million people across almost half the counties in America. At its peak, four million people were using stamps at any given time. The program cost $262 million—a significant sum in Depression-era dollars.

We know the names of the first participants. Mabel McFiggin of Rochester, New York, was the first person to receive food stamps. Joseph Mutolo was the first retailer to accept them. And Nick Salzano earned the dubious distinction, in October 1939, of being the first retailer caught breaking the rules.

Then World War Two arrived, and everything changed.

The war economy absorbed the unemployed. Military demand consumed agricultural surpluses. The two conditions that had created the program—too much food and too little work—simply evaporated. By 1943, the government saw no reason to continue. The program ended, even though poverty and hunger hadn't.

For the next eighteen years, food stamps existed only as an idea debated in Congress, studied in reports, and championed by various senators. Prominent names pushed for revival: George Aiken, Hubert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver. Representative Leonor Sullivan of Missouri spent years trying to pass food stamp legislation. But without the crisis conditions of the Depression—without the political alignment of agricultural interests and anti-poverty advocates—the program remained dormant.

A Campaign Promise in West Virginia

In 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned through the hills of West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the nation. The poverty he witnessed there moved him, and he made a promise: if elected, he would do something about hunger in America.

His first executive order upon taking office called for expanded food distribution. On February 2, 1961, Kennedy announced that food stamp pilot programs would begin. But this new version would be different from the Depression-era model in an important way: it eliminated the requirement to buy surplus produce with the blue stamps.

This seemingly technical change had enormous consequences. The original program had forced participants to buy whatever farmers couldn't sell—a mechanism that directly addressed agricultural overproduction. The new program let people buy any food they wanted, including processed foods from major retailers.

For grocery chains, this was a windfall. For processed food companies, new customers. The political coalition behind food stamps was shifting from farmers desperate to sell surplus crops to a broader alliance of food industry interests.

The Hidden Racial Politics

But there was another dimension to this change that often goes unmentioned in official histories.

The shift to food stamps was heavily resisted by civil rights activists. To understand why, you need to understand the position of Black sharecroppers in the South during the early 1960s.

Mechanization was already pushing Black agricultural workers off the land. As tractors replaced human labor, sharecroppers lost their income—and with it, their ability to buy food stamps, which still required an initial purchase. White-owned grocery stores profited from the program, but plantation owners found new ways to use food stamps as tools of control.

The mechanisms of exploitation were straightforward. Plantation owners would deduct food stamp costs from a sharecropper's income. They would restrict which stores sharecroppers could use their stamps at. They would permit stamps only for the most expensive products. Food stamps, intended to help the poor, became another lever of power in the Jim Crow South.

Many Black activists criticized the program for this reason. What looked like federal assistance was, in practice, reinforcing existing structures of racial domination.

The Great Society and Permanent Food Stamps

President Lyndon Johnson, as part of his "War on Poverty" announced in January 1964, called for food stamps to become a permanent program. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 passed Congress that year, transforming the pilot programs into a nationwide system.

The law established several important principles that would shape the program for decades:

• States would determine eligibility standards and handle certification
• Recipients still had to purchase their stamps, paying roughly what they'd normally spend on food and receiving additional stamps to bring them closer to an adequate diet
• Stamps could buy any food intended for human consumption except alcohol and imported foods
• Discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, or political beliefs was explicitly prohibited
• The federal government would fund the benefits while sharing administrative costs with states

One interesting historical footnote: Representative Bob Dole of Kansas voted against the program in committee. Years later, as a senator, he would become one of its strongest supporters after working on reforms in 1977. His evolution mirrors the program's own transformation from controversial experiment to established institution.

Explosive Growth

The numbers tell a remarkable story of expansion.

In April 1965, just over half a million people participated. By March 1966, participation had doubled to one million. Then it accelerated: two million by October 1967, three million by February 1969, four million by February 1970.

Then something extraordinary happened. In a single month—from February to March 1970—participation jumped from four million to five million. Two months later, it hit six million. By February 1971, ten million Americans were receiving food stamps. By October 1974, fifteen million.

This wasn't primarily because more people were becoming poor. It was geographic expansion—the program was rolling out to more counties, more states, more communities. By July 1974, food stamps operated nationwide, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands.

With growth came concern. How much would this cost? Were the right people receiving benefits? Were states processing applications efficiently? The tension that would define food stamp politics for the next fifty years emerged: how to balance access to the program with accountability for how it was run.

The Purchase Requirement Problem

Throughout this period, one feature of the program drew particular criticism: the purchase requirement.

To receive food stamps, you first had to buy them. If you were very poor, you paid less—but you still had to pay something. The logic was that people should contribute what they'd normally spend on food, with stamps making up the difference to reach an adequate diet.

In practice, this created a significant barrier. The poorest families—the ones who most needed help—often couldn't scrape together enough cash to buy stamps in the first place. They'd go without food stamps entirely, or they'd buy fewer stamps than they qualified for because they couldn't afford the upfront cost.

By 1977, "EPR"—eliminate the purchase requirement—had become the rallying cry for reform. Both Republicans and Democrats proposed legislation that year, though with different emphases. Republicans wanted to target benefits more narrowly and tighten controls. Democrats wanted to expand access and simplify a process that had become cumbersome and delay-prone.

The law that finally passed eliminated the purchase requirement. This single change transformed the program. Suddenly, the poorest Americans could receive food stamps without having to pay anything upfront. Participation would eventually surge to levels the program's founders never imagined.

From Paper to Plastic

For most of its history, food stamps were actual stamps—paper coupons that looked remarkably like money.

They came in booklets with stamps of different denominations: one dollar (brown), five dollars (blue), and ten dollars (green). Each stamp was about half the size of a dollar bill, printed on high-quality paper with watermarks, using the same intaglio printing process the government uses for currency. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing—the same agency that prints dollar bills—produced them.

This made sense from a security standpoint. Food stamps had a one-to-one value ratio with actual money. A ten-dollar food stamp was worth exactly ten dollars at the grocery store. Counterfeiting was a real concern.

But paper stamps had problems. They were stigmatizing—everyone in the checkout line knew you were using government assistance. They could be lost, stolen, or destroyed. They created opportunities for fraud, both by recipients who might sell them and by retailers who might redeem stamps without actually providing food.

In the late 1990s, states began experimenting with a new approach: electronic benefit transfer, or EBT. Instead of paper stamps, recipients received what looked like a debit card. Each month, their benefits would be deposited electronically into an account linked to the card. At the store, they'd swipe the card like any other customer.

By June 2004, every state had converted to EBT. The paper stamps that had given the program its name no longer existed. But the name "food stamps" persisted in popular usage, even after the program was officially renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2008.

How the Program Works Today

The modern SNAP program operates on a formula that considers three main factors: household size, income, and expenses.

Larger households receive more benefits than smaller ones. Higher income means lower benefits, with benefits phasing out entirely above certain thresholds. Certain expenses—particularly shelter costs—can be deducted from income when calculating eligibility and benefit levels.

The program is administered through a federal-state partnership. The federal government, through the Food and Nutrition Service within the Department of Agriculture, sets the rules and pays for the benefits themselves. States handle the actual work of determining who's eligible, issuing benefits, and monitoring compliance. Different states house the program in different agencies—some in social services departments, others in health and human services.

Benefits can be used at authorized retailers, which include traditional supermarkets, convenience stores, and increasingly, farmers' markets. The EBT card works like a debit card—you swipe it, enter a PIN, and the purchase amount is deducted from your balance. At the first of each month (or on a staggered schedule depending on your state), new benefits are deposited.

What can you buy? Almost any food intended for human consumption. Bread, fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, snacks, soft drinks. What can't you buy? Alcohol, tobacco, vitamins, medicines, and prepared hot foods. You also can't use SNAP benefits for non-food items like soap, paper products, or pet food.

The Numbers Behind the Safety Net

In 2018, SNAP provided benefits to approximately 40 million Americans at a cost of $57.1 billion. To put that in perspective, that's roughly 12 percent of the American population receiving some form of food assistance.

But that number fluctuates dramatically with economic conditions. Participation and costs spiked during the Great Recession that began in 2008, peaked around 2013, then declined as the economy recovered through 2017. The program is designed to expand when more people need help and contract when they don't—what economists call an "automatic stabilizer."

In 2017, about 9.2 percent of American households received SNAP benefits at some point during the year. Among children, the rate was much higher: approximately 16.7 percent of all American children lived in households receiving SNAP benefits.

These statistics point to something important about who actually uses the program. It's not just adults who can't find work. It's families with children. It's elderly people on fixed incomes. It's working people whose wages don't stretch far enough. The typical SNAP recipient doesn't fit the stereotypes that often dominate political debates about the program.

The Connection to Supplemental Security Income

For certain Americans, SNAP intersects with another major safety net program: Supplemental Security Income, or SSI.

SSI, created in 1974, provides cash assistance to elderly, blind, and disabled people with limited income and resources. If you qualify for SSI, you may be automatically eligible for SNAP benefits in many states—a recognition that the populations these programs serve significantly overlap.

The exact relationship between SSI and SNAP varies by state. Some states have "cash-out" provisions where SNAP benefits are rolled into the SSI payment as estimated cash value, simplifying administration. Others maintain separate programs. The amount of SNAP benefits an SSI recipient receives depends on state law and individual circumstances.

This complexity reflects a broader truth about American social programs: they developed piecemeal over decades, each with its own rules, eligibility criteria, and administrative structures. Navigating them requires understanding how multiple programs interact—a challenge for both recipients and the caseworkers trying to help them.

The Perpetual Tension

Since the 1970s, food stamp policy has been shaped by a fundamental tension: access versus accountability.

On one side are those who emphasize that hungry people need help quickly, that complicated rules and requirements create barriers, that the administrative burden on recipients should be minimized. They point to studies showing that many eligible people don't participate because the process is too difficult or stigmatizing.

On the other side are those who emphasize that taxpayer money shouldn't go to people who don't truly need it, that fraud and abuse undermine public support for the program, that work requirements and strict verification protect the program's integrity. They point to examples of waste and worry about creating dependency.

This tension plays out in countless policy details. How much documentation should applicants provide? How often should eligibility be reverified? Should recipients have to work or participate in job training? Should states have flexibility to experiment with different approaches, or should rules be uniform nationwide?

Neither side is entirely wrong. There really are eligible people who don't receive benefits because the process is burdensome. There really are cases of fraud and abuse. Good policy requires balancing both concerns—a balance that shifts with political winds and economic conditions.

More Than Just Food

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is about food, obviously. But it's also about much more.

It's about agriculture—the program's origins in managing crop surpluses still echo in its placement within the Department of Agriculture rather than Health and Human Services.

It's about federalism—the complex dance between federal rules and state administration that characterizes so much of American social policy.

It's about race—the program's history cannot be separated from the history of civil rights, sharecropping, and the ways that ostensibly neutral policies can reinforce or challenge existing power structures.

It's about work—the ongoing American debate about whether and how assistance should be conditioned on employment.

And it's about dignity. The shift from paper stamps to electronic cards wasn't just about efficiency or fraud prevention. It was about allowing people to buy groceries without advertising their poverty to everyone in line behind them.

The Bridge Still Stands

Milo Perkins' metaphor of the bridge across the chasm remains apt nearly a century later. On one side, America produces more food than its people can consume—we remain a nation of agricultural abundance. On the other, millions of Americans struggle to afford adequate nutrition.

SNAP is that bridge. Imperfect, politically contested, constantly being redesigned—but still standing, still connecting surplus to need, still serving as one of the primary ways the federal government helps ensure that poverty doesn't mean hunger.

The program has evolved dramatically since Mabel McFiggin received those first stamps in Rochester. The colored paper coupons are gone. The surplus produce requirements are gone. The purchase requirement is gone. What remains is the core idea: that in a country as wealthy as America, no one should go hungry simply because they can't afford to eat.

Whether you call it food stamps or SNAP, whether you see it as essential safety net or problematic government overreach, the program touches tens of millions of American lives every year. It is, for better or worse, one of the ways we've chosen to answer the question of what we owe each other as a society.