Why this is a cool topic:
Did you know about the cheese caves? I did not. I might have vaguely heard of them before, but I feel like I would have remembered something about cheese caves!
So let’s start with the facts. There are underground cave bunkers full of cheese. Roughly 1.4 billion pounds of cheese. These cheese caves are in Missouri.
Missed opportunity for me, after my five years spent in Missouri. Friends who live in Missouri, please tell me if you knew about the cheese caves. I knew about the normal caves, but not the cheese caves.
It all started when the government had too much cheese
The government needed to bail out a struggling dairy industry, so they bought a bunch of milk. Then they made it into cheese, because cheese lasts longer than milk. This all happened around the 1970s.
But then the government had too much cheese. What do you do with 500 million pounds of cheese? That’s a literal figure, by the way. The government had 500 million pounds of cheese. It was costing $1 million a day to store all this cheese. A cheese crisis! Who hasn’t gotten a little too carried away with cheese, though?
The ideal cheese storage location: Springfield, Missouri
Here’s something I did know: Missouri has some good caves. Missouri is sometimes called the “Cave State.” My university had a spelunking club, which I briefly considered joining at one point before I remembered I’m claustrophobic.
Missouri’s limestone caves make the perfect cheese bunker. There’s a ton of space, and the limestone naturally keeps everything cool, so it’s less expensive to store things that need temperature control.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a presence in Kansas City, so when the need arose for temperature-controlled storage, they knew where to look. Most of the cheese was stored in caves outside Springfield, Missouri, where billions of cheese wheels could be safely stashed.
Where is all that cheese today? On your pizza
Once they had a place for the cheese stash, the USDA still needed to offload it all. The government finally started giving the cheese away to communities in need (which is why you might have heard of “government cheese”).
The USDA also helped spike demand for the dairy industry, backing efforts like the “Got Milk?” campaign and pushing fast food chains to add cheesy things to the menu. They partnered with chains like Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to concoct wildly cheesy combos. It was a cheese-spiracy.
These days, the government still has its cheese stash in caves, using it for food assistance programs like school lunches, food banks and natural disaster relief. So ultimately the cheese is there to help people. Meanwhile, private companies like Kraft Heinz also lease the underground space in Missouri to age their cheese.
I’m glad Missouri’s incredible limestone cave system is put to good use. This all reminds me of my capstone project in journalism school, which involved creating an integrated marketing campaign for an underground data center network in — you guessed it — Springfield, Missouri. Turns out, the cold storage that’s good for cheese is also good for data centers.
“Below ground, above standards” is a tagline on the data center’s website, and I always thought it would be a good slogan for a tombstone. But now that I think of it, it’s also a good slogan for underground government cheese.
Go to the source:
How the US Ended Up With Warehouses Full of ‘Government Cheese’ (History)
The Underground Cheese Caves of Missouri (Mental Floss)
Yes, the Government Really Does Stash Billions of Pounds of Cheese in Missouri Caves (Modern Farmer)
Hop take: Beverage of the week
Lake Break American Lager, Mother’s Brewing (Springfield, Missouri)
Springfield doesn’t just have cheese caves: It has Mother’s Brewing! My family visits this part of Missouri often for vacation, so while I didn’t know about the cheese caves, I do know where the beer is. I’d imagine the Lake Break lager would pair well with the strong flavor of aged cave cheese.
In other news
The solar eclipse is coming! I got to see the one in 2017 when Columbia, Missouri was in the path of totality, and it was even cooler than expected. This article was an awesome explainer of everything you’d want to know about total eclipses. The moon is unfortunately not made of cheese, but after learning about the existence of underground government cheese, I’m slightly less sure.
Words of wisdom
“We forgot the crackers!”
— Wallace & Gromit, “A Grand Day Out”
See you in the next Drop-In!
Cheers,
Alex