The United States has been through its fair share of crises. It seems 2020 alone has been one long crisis. But let’s forget about 2020 for a minute and turn our attention to another time, a time when the government faced a strange problem: too much cheese.
If you’re a cheese lover you might be saying to yourself, “Impossible! There’s no such thing as too much cheese.” You and Jimmy Carter may have thought similarly.
In the 1970s, the American economy was tanking and the price of food was inflating. Dairy prices alone shot up 30 percent. The government, in an effort to fix the problem, only made things worse. The price of dairy fell so low that farmers couldn’t make ends meet.
Enter President Jimmy Carter. Under the new President, the government passed a subsidy that put $2 billion into the dairy industry. This money was used to purchase milk that the dairy farmers couldn’t sell, the milk was processed and made into milk powder, butter, and, you guessed it, cheese. American cheese to be specific.
Dairy prices started to regulate, but with a steady customer like the government, the dairy farmers were producing as much milk as they could. As fast as they were producing, the government was buying. But then came the problem of storing all the cheese.
“We had cheese in every cold storage in the United States,” Bob Aschebrock, a cheese grader for the government in the 1970s, told NPR’s Planet Money.
Aschebrock’s job was to test the cheese the government was buying and ensure it was Grade A cheese. The USA only bought the best. But there was too much, 300 million pounds according to History.com. The stockpile overflowed to the point that the cheese had to be stored in old limestone caves in Kansas.
By the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the government had two pounds of cheese stored for each American citizen. Then a crisis: the cheese was going bad. The easy way out of this problem would have been for the government to simply sell the absurd amount of cheese they had accumulated. But that wouldn’t work, if they were to drop 300 million pounds of cheese into the market it would obliterate the dairy industry.
Reagan needed another option.
“Probably the cheapest and most practical thing to do would be to dump it in the ocean,” a USDA official told the Washington Post.
But wasting that much cheese would have been a publicity nightmare. By the end of his first year as President, Reagan made a decision. Give the cheese away. They started by giving it to the military but they could only take so much. Then they offered it to schools but there was still too much left over. Finally, they gave it away to the American people.
“At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turn to waste,” Reagan said in an address in December of 1981.
Thus, lower class American families started bringing home blocks of Velveeta called “Government cheese.” Some say the cheese was only good for mac and cheese and grilled cheese. Others, like the Wahlberg family, stated they used “Government cheese” in their restaurants.
The government supposedly got out of the cheese business by the 1990s, but we find ourselves once again with a stockpile of it. According to CNBC the United States has 1.4 billion pounds of it. So, we just might be seeing history repeat itself.
