This blog is derived from a presentation that I made on March 29 at the “Harkin on Wellness” symposium held in Des Moines, IA. The event was sponsored by the Harkin Institute, founded by former Senator Tom Harkin (D, IA), who was my boss for many years while I served on the staff of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
The farm bill has been the primary vehicle for establishing U.S. farm policy for nearly 90 years, starting with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, part of the legislative New Deal package enacted during the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. U.S. agriculture was in a severe crisis at the time, beset by both the demand-suppressing effects of the Great Depression and the supply shock of the nine-year Dust Bowl devastating agricultural production in the Great Plains region.
While feeding hungry people was not the main focus of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, one of the main mechanisms they chose to provide support for American farmers, the purchase of surplus commodities, lent itself well to such an effort. Initial plans had called for surplus food to be destroyed to remove that quantity entirely from the market, but First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt convinced her husband that it was stupid to destroy food when so many Americans were hungry. Subsequently, the surplus food was distributed in relief programs around the country, and led to the creation of a pair of pilot programs that were precursors to both the food stamp program, now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the school lunch program, which are both mainstays of modern U.S. nutrition assistance efforts. Both experimental programs stalled out early in the Second World War as increased food exports to allied nations made it difficult to define any broad categories of food as truly surplus in U.S. markets.
The school lunch program was authorized as a permanent program under the National School Lunch Act of 1946, supported by President Truman in part because he was appalled by the percentage of young American males who had been rejected for military service during World War II by their draft boards due to their poor nutritional status. Early enhancements to child nutrition programs, such as the Special Milk Program in 1954, and a pilot program for school breakfasts in 1966, occurred outside of the farm bill process. In 1967, the then-chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. William Poage (D, TX) gave up his committee’s jurisdiction over the program to the committee with jurisdiction over the nation’s public education system, currently known as the House Education and Labor Committee, thus excluding this set of programs from the farm bill process forever. It remains under the jurisdiction of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
The last child nutrition act enacted, the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010, technically expired in 2015, although the programs it authorizes are still in operation. The Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, better known as the WIC program, provides nutrition assistance to pregnant and nursing mothers and their offspring prior to the age of four, is also part of child nutrition policy that is largely determined outside of the farm bill process.
The other main nutrition program, once known as the food stamp program, intended to supplement the food purchasing capacity of low-income households, took much longer to be revived after its experimental phase during the Great Depression. After the extent of persistent poverty in the United States and its linkage to poor nutrition was spotlighted by various federal reports and studies released during the 1950’s, Congress gave President Eisenhower the authority to re-establish the food stamp program in 1959, after a nearly 20-year hiatus. However, the then-Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, chose to not exercise that authority in the last year of Eisenhower’s term.
During his presidential campaign in 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy publicly committed to bringing back the program during a visit to West Virginia. After narrowly winning the general election, President Kennedy announced the establishment of a food stamp pilot program within two weeks of his inauguration. By January 1964, just a few months after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, TX, the pilot programs had expanded from eight areas to 43 counties or cities in 22 states with 380,000 participants. The program was permanently authorized in August of 1964, under the Food Stamp Act of 1964, one of the first major legislative accomplishments of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society plan.
For most of its history, the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, focused on increasing the caloric intake of individuals in beneficiary households. Initially, all food items were eligible for purchase with food stamps except alcoholic beverages and imported foods. The House version of the 1964 Act would have prohibited the purchase of soft drinks, luxury foods, and luxury frozen foods, but those restrictions were dropped during the conference committee, and did not become law.
The requirement that recipient households purchase some stamps in order to receive benefits under the program, an artifact of the original experimental program in the 1930’s, was dropped in 1977, when this program was pulled into the farm bill process for the first time. This step was taken in large part to bolster support for the overall legislation by urban members of Congress, who otherwise had little at stake with respect to the farm, trade, and conservation programs that had made up the bulk of the farm bill previously.
Today, both of these programs serve tens of millions of people, helping to alleviate food insecurity among the American people. In 2021, 41 million people received SNAP benefits during at least some portion of the year, while total participation in the school lunch program was only 9.8 million children in that year, down by about two-thirds from 2019 due to ongoing school closures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
