PHILADELPHIA — J. Jhondi Harrell, the founder and executive director of the Center for Returning Citizens (TCRC), remembers life before food stamps.

When he was 12, his father, a long-distance truck driver, had a heart attack. That was in 1967, and the family's economic well-being plummeted as his mother became the sole provider. To help make ends meet, the family joined the food lines in their Levittown community, which doled out surplus agricultural commodities from the government.

"I have very good memories," Harrell recalled. "The cheese was one of the best things you could get."

Except it was also three years after food lines were supposed to be a thing of the past.

The Food Stamp Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 31, 1964, made food stamps a permanent feature after several successful pilot programs, allowing families in need greater choice by shopping in local grocery stores. "The food stamp plan will be one of our most valuable weapons for the war on poverty," Johnson promised at the signing ceremony.

The feeding of America

Food stamps usage exploded. In 1969, the country spent about $250 million on food stamps. By 1974, the deadline for states to fully implement food stamps, that figure escalated to around $4 billion (about $25.5 billion in today's dollars). In fiscal year 2023, the federal government spent $112.8 billion on SNAP, or $211.93 per participant monthly.

Prior to 1974, some in need like Harrell and his mother still stood in line for surplus commodities like powdered milk, powdered eggs, and margarine. Part of the problem was the early days of food stamps required a cash contribution, but the surplus food distribution was free and provided a month's worth of food.

"My mother was a good cook," Harrell said, adding that a favorite meal was spaghetti and Spam.

But by the time Suzanna A. Urminska's family needed food stamps in the early '70s, the eligibility requirements had been nationally standardized. Her parents were refugees from Czechoslovakia, who fled the communist regime and eventually made their way to Hawaii. Urminska, a community food advocate from West Oak Lane, spent her entire childhood on SNAP.

She was born in 1978, a year after the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977 passed, allowing the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, to determine the cost of a healthy diet and eliminating the purchase requirement. It also changed the name from food stamps to SNAP or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Defeat food insecurity

Johnson had two goals: to improve nutrition for recipients and to increase income for farmers. He called the law "a realistic and responsible step toward the fuller and wiser use of our agricultural abundance." Today, about 500,000 Philadelphians rely on SNAP benefits, but the country's largest nutrition program has not yet eliminated food insecurity.

Across the city, 15 of every 100 households don't have access to affordable, healthy food on a consistent basis. That looks like skipping a meal, not eating enough, or going hungry all day. And with food insecurity comes a bevy of physical and mental health issues, including the stigma of using food stamps.

Harrell's mother, however, squashed talk of embarrassment. "My mother's philosophy was there is more stigma to being hungry."

The personal price of food insecurity

Urminska remembers when paper stamps were replaced with the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card in the early 2000s as part of President Bill Clinton's historic welfare-to-work law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). It mandated that states switch over to the EBT system and gave them an Oct. 1, 2002, deadline.

"At times, when I became a parent, I used the card," Urminska said. "It seems to have made [using food stamps] more anonymous. It seemed to me to make it a little more dignified."

But PRWORA's main focus was the fulfillment of Clinton's campaign promise "to end welfare as we know it." Welfare ceased to be an entitlement but became a time-limited benefit. It was seen as an effort to end recipients' dependence on welfare and force them to work.

Urminska recalls her mother's concern about the changes. She had her own small consultancy, working as an art preservationist, and three children. Food stamps were necessary to allow her to balance working and caring for the family.

"They wanted her to go to work as a grocery clerk, and that would have disrupted the entire family," Urminska said.

Modernizing SNAP

An increase in SNAP usage is usually an economic indicator of hard times. When COVID-19 hit and people lost their jobs, Harrell began distributing free food. Even as the pandemic has abated, TCRC serves 10,000 people per month, and if he could rescue more food, he could help more people.

"People's food stamps run out before the end of the month," Harrell explained. That's when they turn to food pantries. Harrell said he believes that SNAP users should get two payments per month instead of one monthly lump sum to help with this problem.

Urminska said she thinks those in need should get cash to spend as they see fit, putting an end to worrisome bureaucratic barriers like the ones that frustrated her mother.

There are also concerns that SNAP regulations have lost touch with the reality of life for working families when it maintains restrictions such as a ban on hot prepared foods.

As a recent editorial from Harvard Public Health noted, "The program still reflects 1960s-era assumptions that mom is at home cooking from scratch, not rushing from work to cobble dinner together. That $4.99 Costco rotisserie chicken is a lifesaver for working parents. Congress must update SNAP to the realities of life in 2024."

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