President Reagan ordered that the surplus of cheese be held in federal storage in warehouses across the country and given to needy Americans. He created the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program, which began handing out the blocks of processed cheese to the elderly, low-income people and organizations that served them. As a result, he said, he’d free 30 million pounds of cheese from the country’s stockpile. “At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turn to waste,” he said in a public address. There were hungry Americans still suffering from the aftereffects of the recession. He had been elected in part by bandying about inaccurate stereotypes of “welfare queens” and poor people who gamed the system, and earlier in 1981 had pledged to reduce the federal food stamp program. “It’s moldy, it’s deteriorating … we can’t find a market for it, we can’t sell it, and we’re looking to try to give some of it away.”Īs the public got wind of the existence of all that surplus cheese, it began to sharply criticize President Ronald Reagan. “We’ve got 60 million of these that the government owns,” he said. Block showed up at a White House event with a five-pound block of greening, moldy cheese and showed it to the press. There was also confusion as to how long the processed American cheese-designed to be stored for long periods of time-really lasted.Īs officials scrambled behind the scenes to figure out how to deal with the cheese, the cheesy conundrum became public when Agriculture Secretary John R. “Probably the cheapest and most practical thing to do would be to dump it in the ocean,” a USDA official told the Washington Post in 1981. The huge supply was a problem, but there was another catch: The government had no idea what to do with all that cheese. (Credit: Dave Buresh/The Denver Post via Getty Images) Jones notes, eventually the stockpile hit over 500 million pounds, stored in hundreds of warehouses in 35 states.īutter and cheese being stacked and distributed during a surplus of dairy products, circa 1983. As dairy farmers produced more and more milk, stockpiles ballooned. The government purchased the milk dairy farmers couldn’t sell and began to process it into cheese, butter and dehydrated milk powder. Suddenly, dairy farmers who had been hurting were flush with cash-and producing as much milk as they could in order to take advantage of government support. Then, in 1977, under President Jimmy Carter, the government set a new subsidy policy that poured $2 billion into the dairy industry in just four years. When the government tried to intervene, prices fell so low that the dairy industry balked. In 1973, dairy prices shot up 30 percent as the price of other foods inflated. The CCC had been around since the Great Depression, when it was created as part of the New Deal’s attempt to stabilize prices and help farmers.ĭuring the 1970s, as Americans sat in long gas lines and watched the economy tank, they faced another crisis: an unprecedented shortage of dairy products. The cheesy story all started in 1949, when the Agricultural Act of 1949 gave the Commodity Credit Corporation, a government-owned corporation dedicated to stabilizing farm incomes, the authority to purchase dairy products like cheese from farmers. The cheese, distributed by a federal program during a time of volatile milk production in the 1980s recession, is iconic to this day, forming fraught memories among those who had to eat it and those who never got a taste. And it came in iconic stacks of five-pound blocks that made it immediately clear it wasn’t your standard cheddar or Camembert. Its color, a pale orange, was eye-catching. Its flavor was described as somewhere between Velveeta and American cheese and smacked of humiliation or gratitude for the people who couldn’t afford not to eat it. If you’ve ever tasted what’s known as “government cheese,” you won’t soon forget it.
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