Why Did the U.S. Government Amass More Than a Billion Pounds of Cheese?

[DGUtley]

Why Did the U.S. Government Amass More Than a Billion Pounds of Cheese?

The long, strange saga of government cheese.


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The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. Decades of propping up the dairy industry—by buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheese—had backfired, hard.

The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible,” a USDA official was quoted as saying. “Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.”

Instead, they decided to jettison 30 million pounds of it into welfare programs and school lunches through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. “At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their Government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turn into waste,” Reagan said in a written statement. The New York Timesdeclared that the bill would “give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus.”



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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/government-cheese

[FindersKeepers]

Cheese, of all things.

That cheese must have been what one woman was talking about years ago when I first started volunteering at the Food Bank. I remember we had some small blocks of cheese in the cooler but she said she used to be able to get big, 5-pound blocks.

If you're feeding hungry folks, cheese seems like a decent product, although the salt content is kind of high. But, a low shelf life when compared to dry-stored grains.

Then again, a whole lot of people who come to the food bank don't want to cook. Or, don't know how.

[DGUtley]

When I was in college, a truck came to my sleepy little farm town that was full of cheese. My grandmother got cheese b/c she was poorer than most. I took a chunk of it back to college.

[carolina73]

My grandmother had severe arthritis and she would get boxes of food every month with large blocks of cheese and butter included. This was in the early 70s not under Reagan.

[The Booman]

They gouda sold it.