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.
Rats
If we locate entire tankers full of tomato sauce and boxcars full of pepperoni we’ll know that Big Pizza is about to make its move.
If you are eating a “breakfast” burrito, you really can’t blame anyone but yourself for its contents, whether it be from McD’s or a Taqueria
If you all wanted to know why dairy consumption is down and milk is so expensive...
Bullet hoarding is real too, with the Us government burning in drums millions of unused bullets every year.
It reminds me of an old movie called, No need for Money, as a capitalist retort to Marx saying money was bad. In there the capitalist raises money fraudulently in a false claim of finding oil in France, using the money to build a refinery and processing Russian oil arriving in waggons. Then one of the engineers finally discovers oil but the dude tels him to tell no one lest the price of oil would go down too much...
What’s the half-life of processed cheese? Yuk.
To replace the gold standard.
Classic, prize winning one !! Congrats !
The logical solution is to reduce the Milk Subsidies.
The dairy farmers won’t like it, but better to only produce what is needed in today’s market. These subsidies only maintain an artificial, false status of what’s normal.
All that cheese needs refrigerating. The refrigerators need to be constantly run by electricity. The electricity is an ongoing expense, also paid by taxpayers, most likely.
It’s time for this long standing, ever-expanding House of Cards to be dismantled or allowed to fall down.
Farm Welfare Queens
This was all extracted from the moon. Those aren’t all craters.
Who needs a strategic oil reserve, there is enough cheese to run a few electricity producing incinerators there for a while.
—I suspect that would be the response of most of young people-—sadly-—
but...but...but...why Processed American Cheese?
Why not REAL cheese?
Thanks to sugar subsidies we probably have Egyptian pyramid blocks of sugar piled up somewhere!
I have often wondered about that.
Looks like you struck a nerve.
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