Cheese Caves
This cheese is not a cheese of honor.
No highly esteemed cheese is commemorated here.
No valued cheese is here.
What cheese is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.
Cheese Caves and Food Surpluses: Why the U.S. Government currently stores 1.4 billion lbs of cheese:
Hundreds of feet below the ground in Missouri, there are hundreds of thousands of pounds of American cheese. Deep in converted limestone mines, caves kept perfectly at 36 degrees Fahrenheit store stockpiles of government-owned cheese comprising the country's 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese. [...]
The government set a new policy to subsidize dairy, providing two billion dollars to the industry over the next four years. While this plan was welcome to dairy farmers, it also primed them for overproduction.
Farmers who had been struggling were motivated to produce as much dairy as they could, knowing that whatever was not sold on the market could likely be purchased by the government, and it was. By the early 1980s, the government owned over 500 million pounds of cheese. The reason the dairy product was converted to cheese was because it has a longer shelf life than other dairy products as the government searched for solutions to the problem it had created. [...]
Though demand is declining, production is not. It has risen 13% since 2010. In 2016, the American dairy industry dumped a whopping 43 million gallons of milk into fields, animal feed, and anaerobic lagoons. Though this waste is staggering, it is also not representative of the size of the surpluses being run by dairy farms. The dairy industry received 43 billion and 36.3 billion dollars in 2016 and 2017, respectively, from the federal government. In 2018, 42% of revenue for U.S. dairy producers came from some kind of government support.
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