A strange picture developed at the height of the Great Depression. The urban dwellers, many of them out of work, were going hungry, while farmers were looking at their crops piling up on the fields in want of buyers. The program to fix both those problems came from several people, most notably U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who suggested the government stepping in to subsidize excess crop purchases. Although enacted only temporarily, this was the prototypical “food stamps” program.

On this day, May 16, in 1939 the first experiment with the FSP was tried out in Rochester, NY, soon to spread to 88 cities and more than 1,700 counties around the country. “Relief” recipients would buy a book of orange stamps for the amount they regularly spent on food, and additionally given 50 cents on the dollar in blue stamps redeemable for the excess crops.

The Food Stamp Program did not become a permanent part of social security net until the early 1960s, when the CBS special Hunger In America depicting starving children in cities galvanized the public and President John F. Kennedy to pass the Food Stamp Act of 1964.