What Will the U.S. Government Do With 1.4 Billion Pounds of Cheese? And before that, he was a reporter for his friend T.C. DUFFIN: Our supervising producer is Alex Goldmark, and our editor is Bryant Urstadt. Al and Ralph may have influenced food safety labeling and your pizzas cheese. SubTropolis | Snopes.com glimpse into the void but a modern-day viewing is near-impossible. MALONE: Bob Aschebrock spent 30 years as a USDA cheese inspector. The net result of that was overcompensating in using this program to help out farmers, to the point where we wound up creating the most massive dairy surplus in U.S. history.. It certainly was on the edge of that. BOB ASCHEBROCK: Yes. NOVAKOVIC: It's really hard to balance what you want to do socially or politically with what you can get away with economically. India and Bhutan's yak herders face steep challenges. You'll receive your first newsletter soon! Karen's doing the dance. Follow us on Twitter to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. One particularly large pile of it resides in the former limestone quarries underneath Springfield, Missouri, where Kraft Heinz keeps a considerable cache of cheese in these temperature-controlled facilities. History is a mystery. is cottonseed oil safe for nut allergy NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. MALONE: OK. OK. We're not here to make fun of Velveeta. The mine naturally maintains temperatures between 65 and 70 F year-round, making it a great space for a lot of different types of businesses. MALONE: (Laughter) And you just have a big knife. So they created a brand-new special program to give the cheese away through food banks. See. Missouri's caves can . NOVAKOVIC: You've got two levers you can pull on. Heap the flour on your countertop and make a well in the center. Family-run for more than a century, this pizzeria makes a unique mustard pie. So just wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling CALLAHAN: Floor-to-ceiling - and then as you kept filling it, you just worked your way right back out. That was pretty good. AUDIE CORNISH, BYLINE: The White House is coming to the aid of farmers hurt by its own hard-line trade policies. Grab a latte at the birthplace of modern American skateboarding. This restaurant serves wood-fired fare served in a natural cave with a live spring. He's been working here since the 1970s, since the cheese debacle. The Best List of Caves in Missouri - World of Caves Oh, boy - here we go. To the cheese cave. They are open spaces of various sizes and shapes that often intersect with each another or with different generated structures, creating vast cave systems. MALONE: So to raise the price of milk, the government basically opened up the world's largest cheese shop - you know, and powdered milk and butter, too. Basically the dairy industry is looking to expand its market and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is looking to expand the agricultural economy and they become very intertwined., It helped that the burgeoning field of nutrition science promoted dairy products as essential for both adults and children. Through our sister company, Cold Zone, we are able to store refrigerated food, such as cheese for our tenants. Lets just call it tunnel vision. In 2016, dairy farmers resorted to simply dumping 43 million gallons of milk down the drain. The Dairy Farmers of America, which has been using the facility, known as the Springfield Underground, for more than 30 years, currently has 7 million pounds of raw product.Some of this is normal inventory storage or cheese being aged. Metallic, sour, whey taint, weedy, onion, barny, lipase and sulfide. You don't do that, huh? SubTropolis (Kansas City) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go All rights reserved. OnlyInYourState may earn compensation through affiliate links in this article. Yes, that is a lot of cheese. MALONE: You can see pictures of the cheese cave. Although there are around 1.4 billion pounds of excess cheese in the form of large wheels kept in cold storage limestone caves hundreds of feet below the ground outside of Springfield, Missouri just off Interstate 435, it is not all controlled by the government (only about 300 million pounds). Youll love exploring this amazing geological wonder. Visit a sweet shop selling one of the first candies ever made and sold in America. DUFFIN: This is why there is also a community of people who are still obsessed with government cheese - Internet chat boards trying to find something comparable, restaurants claiming they have a recipe for it. MALONE: Now, to be fair, that's probably not enough to start filling caves again. MALONE: So it's 1977. ASCHEBROCK: But then we had the issue of storing the stuff. The program is meant to "purchase Mozzarella, Process and Natural American Cheddar Cheese for the National School Lunch Program and other Federal food nutrition assistance programs." Well, sort of. NOVAKOVIC: The federal government wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with tanker loads of milk. The air is cool and the barroom massive almost cathedral-like. As strange as this predicament might seem, the U.S. is far from the only country to artificially stabilize agricultural prices by stockpiling food products. More Info Directions. How Government Cheese Became Welfare For Farmers - YouTube The Heim family owned property all over Kansas City at the turn of the century, including breweries called Rochester and Imperial, as well as the one in East Bottoms. MALONE: Yes. ASCHEBROCK: I traveled 39 states, and I was gone as long as 10 weeks at a time doing that. The Big Cheese Lie: No, The U.S. Isn't Sitting On 1.4B Pound Surplus Euthanized cows and caves full of cheese: the government policies And he started floating this idea. Emily Standlee is a freelance writer at KCUR and a national award-winning essayist. Love Kansas? Missouri has more than 7,000 caves under its ground, though fewer than 20 are easily accessible to most people. And it took a few years, but a flood of cheese starts to come in. Like so many things in American public policy, this traces to the New Deal, but actually goes even a little bit before that, says Andrew Novakovi, a professor of Agricultural Economics at Cornell University. A large portion is also owned by companies, who . MALONE: One of the ways Carter proposed giving farmers an equal break was to raise the price of milk by about 6 cents per gallon, which was kind of a lot at the time. Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City even has special ordinances that govern the use of underground space, including how the roofs must be supported, and about 3,000 to 4,000 people work full-time in the cave system, Hasan said. It's also mostly water, so you've got to haul it around in those, like, gas tankers. Why A Missouri Cave Stores Millions Of Pounds Of Cheese - MSN Why The US Government Has Kept Over 1 Billion Pounds Of Cheese In Lamar Hunt, the late founder of the Kansas City Chiefs, is perhaps the most well-known of the cave developers. NOVAKOVIC: So it's fundamental economics. In the 2000s, you could still take an official tour and potentially find a way in for a D.I.Y. Hogwarts, who? ASCHEBROCK: Will eat any cheese. And the United States Postal Service's Philatelic Sales Divison, the national distribution center for . KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) A mother is in custody after her two children were found barefoot, dirty, and living in a wooden shipping crate in an underground cave part of a massive subterranean network carved out beneath Kansas City. DUFFIN: But that does not work for milk because milk starts going bad the minute it comes out of the cow. Out of 25 buildings, a whopping 24 were saloons. MALONE: One part of the solution then was to gently get that milk supply down. Limestone mine in the bluffs above the Missouri River in Kansas City, MO, US, Learn how and when to remove this template message, United States Environmental Protection Agency, National Archives and Records Administration, "SubTropolis | Industrial Space for Lease in Kansas City", "Bloomberg.com 2015-02-04 Welcome to Subtropolis The Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City", "Archives.gov 2018-02-26 Kansas City, MO Federal Records Center", SubTropolis Technology Center home site (Hunt Midwest), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SubTropolis&oldid=1140599869, Buildings and structures in Kansas City, Missouri, Articles lacking in-text citations from January 2020, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia cave articles with unreferenced coordinates, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 20 February 2023, at 21:12. And so they try to hire more cheese graders. You may even encounter some paranormal activity while youre exploring. MALONE: Dan says that the cheese took up about half an acre of space. In a blog post by writer Libbie Bond, the Deans are described as among the first in America to visualize abandoned mines as commercial real estate.. Andy Novakovic spent his summers as a kid working on his grandparents' dairy farm in Wisconsin. And thus, you won't be flooding anyone's market. We've got 60 million of these that the government owns with mold. DAN CALLAHAN: No, I've never thought about it. Warehouses Bulge With Surplus Cheese, Butter and Dried Milk PublishedSeptember 7, 2018 at 7:20 AM CDT. It sounds amazing. Expand All. Dug into the Bethany Falls limestone mine, SubTropolis is, in places, 160 feet (49m) beneath the surface. I'm Karen Duffin. You've got to be on they special mailing list. Lawmakers worried that any blow to the nations dairy farmers could lead to drastic shortages down the line.