Fifty years ago, on an unseasonably mild January morning, the first clinic in the country that would administer the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, opened in Pineville, Kentucky out of the Bell County Health Department. The small wood-paneled building — which now sits up the street from the Dollar General, in the shadow of Pine Mountain — was packed that day. Betty Hopkins, a now-retired nurse who worked at the clinic, described it as such: “It was like hoopla.”
In the decades since, WIC has continued to grow and to serve huge swaths of the American population, including about 6.3 million participants each month in the fiscal year 2022.
