Debit cards replace paper checks to ease shopping, reduce stigma, in government-funded nutrition program

California residents who receive money for food through the Women, Infants and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program are now getting electronic cards instead of the cumbersome paper vouchers they’ve shopped with since the program’s inception in 1974.
The federal program, better known by the acronym WIC, helps feed more than 1 million people statewide, most of them children.
Modernization is expected to make the benefit more efficient and easier to use, and less embarrassing, for th