"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.

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.