Dairy Management’s strategy is more surreptitious than advertisements about milk moustaches it has successfully convinced the public of dairy’s health benefits, despite most scientific evidence pointing to the contrary. However, government cheese disproportionately goes to low-income individuals. These efforts aimed at increasing consumer consumption have been successful: The average American consumes 14 more pounds of cheese a year than they did in 1990. Dairy Management’s main strategy has been to increase consumer confidence in milk and dairy products by expounding their health benefits and nutritional value. Still operating today, Dairy Management is a federally-funded nonprofit corporation whose mission is to promote American-made dairy products, a mission recognizable in their “Got Milk?” advertisement campaign, the Fuel Up to Play 60 Campaign, and even the Dominos bailout following the 2010 recession. This program birthed the term “government cheese,” and despite the 1981 farm bill’s attempt to bite into the 2-billion-pound cheese surplus, the 30 million pounds of cheese it released barely made a dent in the stockpile.Īs a result, the government established Dairy Management. The cheese was distributed to people on welfare, food stamps, and Social Security through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program until the 1990s. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed a farm bill that released 30 million pounds of processed cheese for states to give to low-income residents. Purging this excess cheese has been a problem for the United States government since the Great Depression, and the primary solution to this long-standing problem has been fairly consistent: feed the cheese to the poor. These limestone caves in Springfield, Missouri are home to the United States’ largest stockpile of its 1.2 billion-pound surplus of cheese, built up through subsidies by the US government. Thousands of red, orange, and yellow barrels line the floor like an industrial sunset, each oversized trashcan weighing 680 pounds and filled to the brim with dairy. An elaborate system of pumps runs a steady stream of coolants from aboveground to protect the buried inventory. In this man-made cave, however, it’s a cool 36. One hundred feet underground, temperatures normally hover around 58 degrees Fahrenheit.
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