government cheese you probably won't
find it in anyone's fridge today but you
might still catch glimpses of it in pop
culture it made its way into iconic
standup sets and SNL sketches it's
become a signifier of urban poverty for
artists from New York Philadelphia but
the epicenter of government cheese
actually rested in Kansas City Missouri
the modest City stored four billion
dollars worth of government cheese in
capes and shipped millions of pounds of
it all across the country when I was a
kid and we used to get it it would come
in these big brick type blocks and it's
like dayglo orange you can't mistake it
in the mid-80s at the height of the
government cheese phenomenon there were
roughly 1.2 billion pounds of surplus
cheese in the u.s. that's a lot of
cheese but we actually have more today
than we did in 1984 but I'm getting
ahead of myself
the story of government cheese can be
traced back to the same roots as food
assistance programs like Snap today not
in humanitarianism but in agriculture in
the case of government cheese it all
boiled down to milk prices people talk
about food assistance programs as if
they were created to help poor people
out and you know yes that's true but
almost all of the major food assistance
programs were ideas that came from
agriculture because we had too much of
something so what happened to government
cheese and could it make a comeback to
understand how he got to the point where
Martha Stewart and Snoop Dog are talking
about it where do you buy government
cheese you don't buy it
you got to be on a special melody let's
go back to the very start of American
cheese in the 1850s in 1851 Jesse
Williams opened the first American
cheese factory in Rome New York in 1903
James L Kraft moved from Canada to the
US and began selling cheese out of a
wagon in Chicago a few years later he
formed Crafton Brothers and in 1916 he
filed his first patent for the process
to create what we now know as American
cheese I have discovered that cheese of
the cheddar genus may be prevented from
disintegrating under the action of heat
and that cheese used up a lot of milk
q the dairy farmers rural America
represented over half of the population
and farmers represented over half of
rural America so there was a real sense
that if you were helping out farmers you
were helping out just a whole lot of the
Great Depression rocked the milk market
and the government stepped in to help
control prices the USDA used a pricing
index called the parity price formula
basically if the price of milk dipped
below what it cost to produce it the
government would help cover the
difference and that provided farmers
with a peace of mind that their business
wouldn't tank because of something like
an economic depression or a war in 1949
Congress passed the agricultural act
establishing a formal price support
system for farmers and it's not just for
cheese the government tries to keep a
stable supply of agricultural
commodities like wheat corn and dairy
one way to do that is by buying up extra
product that depression-era logic really
just kind of continued up until about
the 1980s there was always some event
that that occurred that made you glad
you had this program in place by the end
of the 70s milk prices were all out of
whack
in 1977 President Carter's
administration enacted a new subsidy
that injected two billion dollars into
the dairy market over the next four
years suddenly it was very profitable to
produce milk so farmers produced a lot
of it so much milk there was nowhere to
store it all before it spoiled it was
turned into butter powdered milk and
cheese and the government bought it up
tons of it literally the government had
so much excess dairy they didn't know
what to do with it a lot of times when
people talked about this they talked
about the government buy and dairy
products as if some guy was going down
to the local Kroger's and picking up a
cart full but in fact what they did is
they simply put out an announcement
we will buy these products and these
prices anybody interested let us know in
December 1981 President Reagan who
earlier that year had pledged to scale
back the food stamp program caved and
said the US would distribute 30 million
pounds of extra cheese to those in need
with nonfat dry milk you can send that
overseas and there's almost an unlimited
potential to feed hungry people if you
open it up to the world cheese has
almost no feasible option to go overseas
and so you had to do it domestically
cheese is typically stored in bulk in
forty five pound boxes or 500 pound
barrels but giving out whiskey barrel
sized cheese just isn't practical so
manufacturers started processing it in
smaller portions and from the warehouses
of Kansas City and other stockpiles
across the country boxes upon boxes of
processed cheese were packaged up into
five-pound blocks shipped across America
and government cheese was born by 1984
the US was storing roughly five pounds
of cheese for every American it got to
the point where agencies would be going
to like senior citizen centers with
baskets of two-pound loaves of processed
cheese and just handing them out the
temporary emergency food assistance
program said the cheese to food pantries
school lunch programs and other
organizations that could distribute the
bricks of yellowy orange dairy substance
it has a distinctive taste which people
have described as like kind of a cheddar
cheese whiz type of
and it seems like people either loved it
or hated it
you know there is no middle ground
something that started out with economic
intentions had social and political
consequences it was a staple of your
childhood so there is a nostalgia about
that similar to how a lot of people
would feel about you know breakfast
cereal or peanut butter and jelly but at
the same time it's yet another aspect of
life as a poor person that you had no
control over so you got it whether you
want it or not and you had no choice if
you liked it or not
this block of surplus dairy product
became a neatly packaged symbol of
economic status sitting in refrigerators
across America by the 90s it wasn't
profitable for dairy farmers to pump out
so much milk in government cheese
essentially disappeared you might still
catch a reference to it on menus like
wall burgers but today's American cheese
probably isn't coming from Uncle Sam
dairy farmers are struggling with low
prices again but not because of an
economic depression genetics technology
and big farms have made milk production
more efficient than ever before and
consumer preferences are changing liquid
milk consumption is down but cheese
consumption is on the rise and we have a
lot of cheese but Americans don't have
the same desire for processed American
cheese like they did in the 80s now it's
all about specialty artisan cheeses
which can turn a higher profit but they
aren't as easy to make in mass so here
we are dairy prices on edge millions of
Americans living with food insecurity
more than a billion pounds of extra
cheese could government cheese be the
answer the government actually did buy
up 11 million pounds of surplus cheese
back in 2016 and distributed it through
welfare programs since 2016 the USDA has
spent more than 47 million dollars
buying up 22 million pounds of US
surplus cheese there's also
dependency argument of farmers getting
too used to having the government step
in and make surpluses go away at some
point you start asking the question our
farmers making milk just so they can
sell it to some government program
another place you may see that extra
dairy pop up school lunches the Trump
administration has been scaling back
some nutrition regulations and school
cafeterias and that's good news for the
dairy industry 40 percent of milk
consumption in the u.s. comes from kids
2 to 17 years old and with a higher
sodium limit school kitchens can
incorporate more cheese into their
plates and there's certainly plenty to
go around this notion of we're really
good at making stuff and sometimes we
make a little bit more than we know what
to do it goes hand in hand with oh
there's some people that really could
use some help so you know you can argue
that's a win-win but the people who are
really concerned about food assistance
say well maybe these guys don't watch
these