Credit to Faith Smith

Sliced American Pasteurized Process Cheese

Earlier this year. word once again spread of the “cheese caves,” caverns scattered all around the U.S., including right here in  Missouri, housing over a billion pounds of government-owned cheese. With the phrase “cheese cave” evoking imagery of deep, dark tunnels just brimming with cheese, it’s no wonder a story so ridiculous has captured so much interest.

“Yes, I have heard of [the cheese caves],” senior Riley Kloecker said. “I heard there’s a giant cave where the government stores cheese and keeps it from us.”

Despite the sensationalized stories, the story of the “cheese caves” is not quite as outlandish it sounds. To understand how the government could come to possess such absurd amounts of dairy, one must take a step back into the United States of the 1930s. At this time, farming was done by many, many smaller farms as opposed to the fewer enormous farms that create our produce today. That meant that scattered around the U.S. were millions of farmers with 30 common interests and common problems. So, whenever farmers were struggling, politicians would rush to their aid in hopes of securing their votes.

“The vast majority of members of Congress had farmers in their district,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Consultant Andrew Novakovic said. “Hence, the politics of supporting farmers wasn’t controversial, although the nature and depth of that support certainly was.”

And support farmers they did, for the 1930s were especially trying times for American farmers. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl had left many farmers in financially unfavorable positions. The dairy industry was especially struggling, with interest on dairy products reaching a whopping 30% according to The Farmlink Project. To help stabilize the dairy market, the federal government began buying the farmers’ supply in the form of butter and cheese when demand was low, storing it, and selling it when demand was high. This allowed dairy farmers to milk to their heart’s content without worrying about matching demand. However, as decades passed and the market evolved, this arrangement soon got out of hand.

“I believe that it was in 1980 that the government bought more milk-equivalent in cheese than all of the milk produced in Canada in that year,” retired director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Mark Stephenson said. “That was a problem that had to be addressed.”

As demand for dairy products declined, farmers continued to pump out as much milk as they could, certain that the government would buy up what customers wouldn’t. This forced the government to dedicate valuable time and money to storing all the dairy they couldn’t sell. Warehouses and eventually repurposed mines (not caves, as commonly believed) all around the country, including in nearby Springfield, were filled almost entirely with enormous quantities of cheese. In an effort to get rid of some of this cheese, the government began handing it out to people in need. Programs like WIC and SNAP provided eligible women and children with blocks of “government cheese.”

“I don’t remember it being nasty,” Former WIC beneficiary, Samantha Washington said. “We actually ate it all the time. My mom made mac and cheese with it.”

Perhaps less altruistically, the government has also established and funded several organizations to bring up dairy consumption. For example, Dairy Management Incorporated, an organization managed and funded by a sub department of the USDA, partners with large businesses like McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to include more cheese in their menus. While the nutritional value of milk and dairy products has come into question in recent years, one thing is for certain: the government will go to great lengths to ensure that you have, indeed, got milk. Today, the cheese caves sadly now lie empty, successfully emptied by the government over the years. Though the caves may no longer exist, they will live on through America’s timeless love of cheese.