Today, this is provided through multiple federal nutrition assistance welfare programs such as SNAP, CACFP, NCE, SFSP, WIC, and also through school lunch programs.īut in the 1990s, they also started making deals with fast food restaurant chains to incorporate more cheese products in their menus at low prices. Beginning in the 1980s, the government’s primary solution was to give as much of it away to the poor as they can. It also leads to the question of what the government has been doing with the cheese it has been buying for all these years. That leaves us with more cheese than anyone, even the experts, knows what to do with. At the same time, government subsidies have continued to support dairy production, buying up surplus to keep prices steady. The excess is turned into cheese for storage and longevity (and the enjoyment of delicious cheese products). Department of Agriculture data, Americans have cut their milk consumption down from 35 pounds to an average of 15 per person annually. The nation eating this much cheese is not only mind-boggling: It’s growing less and less likely. Capitol.” Suffice to say, nobody’s suggesting we could consume it all. Reports attempting to quantify this astonishing amount have deferred to metrics like “enough to wrap around the U.S. The United States’ dairy surplus has reached a record high, rounding out at 1.4 billion pounds of cheese. According to Emily Moon’s reporting at Pacific Standard, the USDA now has a stockpile of 1.4 billion pounds of processed American cheese. dairy industry to make billions of pounds of cheese from the millions and millions of gallons of surplus milk. dairy industry that far exceeds the appetites of over 327 million Americans to consume it.īut rather than reduce the subsidies to reduce the surplus to more reasonable levels, the USDA is instead paying 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. federal government established dairy subsidies to bail out America’s dairy farmers from the Great Depression. Single Issues of The Independent Review.

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Us stockpile of cheese