Hundreds of feet below the ground in Missouri, there are hundreds of thousands of pounds of American cheese. How we got to this point is a long story, and it starts during a national dairy shortage in the s. So, in , then-President Jimmy Carter decided to pour money into the dairy industry to motivate production and alleviate the crisis. 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 s, the government owned over 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.
This led to Ronald Reagan enacting public distribution of the government cheese in That year then-Secretary of Agriculture, John R. It was given away for free by pickup to people at food banks, community centers, and so on. Flash forward to , when the government again found itself storing cheese, this time to the tune of 1. According to the USDA , American milk consumption has dropped from pounds per capita in to pounds per capita in Though demand is declining, production is not.
In , 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 It is important to note that the dairy lobby is largely responsible for influencing politics to dedicate this money for the industry, and the money mostly goes to the big dairy companies that fund the lobby, leaving smaller operations to fend for themselves in the increasingly competitive market.
