Posted on 03/05/2019 9:28:30 AM PST by gattaca
Rather than reduce dairy subsidies, the USDA has been paying to have surplus milk made into cheese.
In the 1930s, the U.S. federal government established dairy subsidies to bail out America’s dairy farmers from the Great Depression. Managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, those same subsidies are still in effect today, where they have underwritten a massive surplus of milk in the U.S. dairy industry that far exceeds the appetites of over 327 million Americans to consume it.
But rather than reduce the subsidies to reduce the surplus to more reasonable levels, the USDA is instead paying the U.S. dairy industry to make billions of pounds of cheese from the millions and millions of gallons of surplus milk. According to Emily Moon’s reporting at Pacific Standard, the USDA now has a stockpile of 1.4 billion pounds of processed American cheese.
The United States’ dairy surplus has reached a record high, rounding out at 1.4 billion pounds of cheese. Reports attempting to quantify this astonishing amount have deferred to metrics like “enough to wrap around the U.S. Capitol.” Suffice to say, nobody’s suggesting we could consume it all.
The nation eating this much cheese is not only mind-boggling: It’s growing less and less likely. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, Americans have cut their milk consumption down from 35 pounds to an average of 15 per person annually. The excess is turned into cheese for storage and longevity (and the enjoyment of delicious cheese products). At the same time, government subsidies have continued to support dairy production, buying up surplus to keep prices steady. That leaves us with more cheese than anyone, even the experts, knows what to do with.
It also leads to the question of what the government has been doing with the cheese it has been buying for all these years. Beginning in the 1980s, the government’s primary solution was to give as much of it away to the poor as they can. Today, this is provided through multiple federal nutrition assistance welfare programs such as SNAP, CACFP, NCE, SFSP, WIC, and also through school lunch programs.
But in the 1990s, they also started making deals with fast food restaurant chains to incorporate more cheese products in their menus at low prices.
To help sell its surplus in the 1990s, the National Dairy Promotion Board created Dairy Management Incorporated, a semi-public marketing branch of the USDA funded through government “checkoff” fees from dairy producers. This agency gave us the “Got Milk?” campaign and a host of popular fast food menu items, including Domino’s seven-cheese pizzas and Taco Bell’s very cheesy Quesalupa. A 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek investigation called the group of chemists and nutritionists the “Illuminati of cheese.” “The checkoff [program] puts DMI’s agents inside Burger King, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Wendy’s, where they’re privy to each restaurant chain’s most closely guarded trade secrets,” writes Clint Rainey.
There is an unintended consequence in the federal government forcing so much unwanted cheese into the diets of American consumers. It is contributing to the growing health problem of obesity.
For a federal agency dedicated to improving overall nutrition and providing dietary guidance, these partnerships may seem like a contradiction—with good reason, experts say. DMI’s efforts “impose health costs on Americans generally, but disproportionately harm low-income African Americans and Latina/os who live in urban centers dominated by fast food restaurants,” argues legal scholar and food oppression expert Andrea Freeman in a 2013 report.
If it weren’t for the USDA’s excessive subsidies, would “food oppression expert” even be an occupation? A lot of this silliness could be simply stopped by either eliminating or greatly reducing the USDA’s dairy subsidies to better fit the demand of American consumers for cheap cheese.
Government Cheese
Miles Weber knows to stay away from the Cheeseman.
I’d say it is time to “cut the cheese”!!!
‘Rats like cheese?
I remember the 70’s when the government cleared out the stockpile. They were giving this cheese away to anyone on welfare, food stamps, elderly SS recipients, etc.
Other people who got to try it became indignant that this cheese was WAAAAAAAY better than ANY cheese you could buy in a store with your hard-earned paycheck.
I recall this created much resentment in my neighborhood.
No doubt was one of the things which got Reagan elected.
I used to think the same way about subsidies, but do you really want farmers to go out of business because of a bad harvest? It's hard enough just to convince people that farming is a worthwhile thing to do, what happens when nobody is interested anymore in farming?
Let’s start paying the Chinese with cheese!
They are building another moon as a possible deportation site for us deplorables?
Do they still hand out Government Cheese to welfare recipients, or was too undignified, and now just put more $$ on their WIC cards?
Have you seen what they call “cheese” in a MickeyD’s sausage breakfast burrito?
That stuff AIN’T cheese.
Pinky and the Brain are in control?
It’s for people who live in a van down by the river!
New vehicle start up Mootarola unvails
new prototype car that runs on government cheese.
Slogan...”It’s the Cheesiest!”.
Obviously the ABCXYZ agencies are not doing their part
by consuming enough cheese.
Slogan...”Let them eat cheese!”
I want my Gummint Cheez!
I found a beautiful hard bound copy a few years ago and re-read it. Just fantastic. As soon as I finished, I handed it to a young teen who was nearby and suggested he try an adventure story of a boy his age. He looked at me as if I were from Mars and set the book down and returned to his iPhone game. My guess the book was in the trash that night.
MMMMM! Grilled cheese sammich with tomato soup!!
Will Democrats investigate if Trump Cuts the Cheese?
“over 327 million Americans”
There’s about 250 million Americans. The other 77 million are aliens who happen to be standing on our dirt, mostly against our will.
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