The 43,000,000 square feet structure is owned by Americold and is primarily used for food production. A set of caves along Interstate 435 offered a convenient cold-storage option. MALONE: The theory was that if you give cheese away to people who can't afford it, then you're not stealing business from real cheese sellers. The idea of "government cheese" is an enduring blip in the American psyche. It has a grid of 16 feet high, 40 foot wide tunnels separated by 25 foot square limestone pillars created by the room and pillar method of hard rock mining. In 2016, dairy farmers resorted to simply dumping 43 million gallons of milk down the drain. Government cheese, as the orange blocks of commodity cheese came to be called, wasnt exactly popular with all of its recipients. ASCHEBROCK: I'm not running down Velveeta, but I'll tell you, the government processed loaf was 10 times - 100 times better. Kansas City Chiefs Home: The official source of the latest Chiefs news, videos, photos, tickets, rosters, and gameday information Remember Government cheese? Posted on June 16, 2022 by June 16, 2022 by Known for its hiking trails (with Missouri River views), wineries and the McCormick distillery, Weston is also home to OMalleys, the oldest bar in Missouri. DUFFIN: OK. Karen's doing the dance. And Andy had a ringside seat to it. But there is a chance that the government may be in the business of government cheese again. [3] The National Archives and Records Administration also leases space for a Federal Records Center. The cheese was processed and made into 2 and 5 pound bricks and given away as food aid to the poor of America. The brick structure 9th & State calls home is one of a few left standing since those raucous Paris of the Plains days. Jimmy Carter's campaign promise to help farmers in 1976 not only gave us government cheese but also milk mustaches. A NASA employee needing an area to test sensitive navigational instruments was among the first official cave occupants. SUBSCRIBE for Every Delicious Theory! How would you like to work underground? Posted on June 8, 2022 ; in pete davidson first snl episode; by Deep under Springfield, Missouri, lies a cheese cave of industrial proportions, a 2-million-square-foot refrigerated warehouse called Springfield Underground.Since 2008, Kraft Foods has rented . While the popular cheese has changed a lot since then, from access limited to royalty in 1625 to the confinement of "government cheddar" during World War II, the caves are constant . MALONE: That is right. And the Ronald Reagan team was stuck dealing with these caves full of cheese. As the room and pillar mining method is used to extract limestone throughout the Midwest, many companies are looking at ways to utilize the hundreds of millions of square feet created in this manner for everything from mushroom farming to crude oil stockpiling. And not all of it was aging well. MALONE: Right. MALONE: Releasing a tsunami of surplus cheddar the wrong way would push the price of cheese and milk way down. Starting in 1995, a government nonprofit has promoted a pro-dairy policy - in direct opposition to the Department of Agriculture and government nutritionists. NOVAKOVIC: Exactly. Throw two tbps of butter into a pressure cooker and melt them. Share your experiences in the comment section below. NOVAKOVIC: The federal government wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with tanker loads of milk. A cave in Kansas formerly used to store government cheese. Missouri has more than 7,000 caves under its ground, though fewer than 20 are easily accessible to most people. But the surplus was growing so fast that 30 million pounds barely made a dent. 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.. Park University in the Kansas City suburb of Parkville has dozens of classrooms and offices in the caves and rents out other underground space to businesses. It is an enormous artificial cave situated above the Missouri River. The 55,000,000-square-foot, 1,100-acre underground storage facility is believed to be the world's largest site of its kind. Embark on a wonderful cave tour and learn all about its history. Oh, yeah. NOVAKOVIC: So you can imagine, you know, you don't just kind of roll down one of these barrels down Seventh Avenue in New York City and say, anybody want some cheese? With temperatures maintained at 25F and 35F, staff have nicknamed the space the "Ice Cube." You don't want that? According to USDA statistics, the average American eats 34.1 pounds of cheese every year and is projected to eat 36.5 pounds by 2024. But cheese doesn't travel well, so the government landed on a third option. Government Cheese Over the years, the government has gravitated toward one method of unloading dairy surplus: giving it to the poor. So the thing that the government was concerned about is what's called commercial displacement. You cansign up to receive stories like this in your inbox every Tuesday. And as of March 31, the U.S. still has 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in cold storageonly now its owned by private companies. CALLAHAN: So it'd be all the way to the ceiling. If youve been in the cheeky, sophisticated Campground bar, youve set foot where the original J. Rieger & Co. building stood. ASCHEBROCK: You. MALONE: Dan says that the cheese took up about half an acre of space. MALONE: This is one of those slow-moving train wrecks that you can see coming from a mile away. DAN CALLAHAN: No, I've never thought about it. About 3.2 acres of available space are added each year as active mining continues. And it's the most government packaging you will ever see - just, like, brown cardboard, some black USDA stamps on it. NOVAKOVIC: Yeah. The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. The Rieger family went into banking and the West Bottoms distillery was paved over. Its at the same park! Thanks for listening. I'm Karen Duffin. 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.. Nevertheless, dairy surpluses still very much exist. Since that requires capital, the dairy industry starts consolidating, says Andrea Wiley, author of Re-Imagining Milk. NOVAKOVIC: We took a small amount of money from every dairy farmer, collected on every pound of milk they sold, and we created the National Dairy Board. There you go. You'll receive your first newsletter soon! NOVAKOVIC: You can imagine the cheese company that's in the business of selling cheese is going to say, hey, what's the deal here? A slice of Kraft cheese is going to be less about. And so they pass a law saying that they want the price of milk to go up automatically every six months. . MALONE: You were hired as someone to show up with a metal thing ASCHEBROCK: Not - no, no, no. To do so, however, required a serious upfront investment. 1. Imagine watching lines of people wait around to be handed a giant block of moldy, bright orange cheese. MALONE: One part of the solution then was to gently get that milk supply down. The Giant Animal Cluster, located in Bonne Terre is another wacky attraction in Missouri. Jimmy Carter was running for president. Well, sort of. MALONE: Novakovic says the government could have destroyed the cheese. Expand All. The New York Times declared that the bill would give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus.. JUNOT DIAZ: Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. MALONE: So this leaves a couple of options. One of the efforts was to establish a program by which the government would guarantee a price on a handful of agricultural commodities to encourage production.. And he says getting rid of caves full of grade-A government cheese was an economically tricky issue. Government agents were in uncharted territory. JAY-Z: (Rapping) After that government cheese, we eatin' steak. It's only about a 3-inch-in-diameter hole. PHIL HARTMAN: (As character) Matt, we're ready for you. However, as the room and pillar mining method continues to be used to extract limestone throughout the Midwest, growth of such facilities is quite possible. Today, the National Archives has four underground facilities. Like, are you the most picky cheese-eater in your group of friends? Before that, he was a reporter for WNYC's Only Humanpodcast. dynamite. OnlyInYourState may earn compensation through affiliate links in this article. The USDA has a large presence in Kansas City, Missouri, and when it found itself with millions of pounds of surplus dairy and needed a safe, climate-controlled place to put it all, it started to search locally. I mean, it was really, really good product. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Get more stories delivered right to your email. Since 1916, when James Lewis Kraft patented American cheese, the U.S. had the technology to create a cheese product that could last for years. Its existence serves as a reminder of Kansas Citys knack for innovative transportation especially as new railways for the streetcar go down all along Main Street. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: A state official estimated 300,000 people will get a taste of today's cheese. DUFFIN: (Laughter) That's right. It's going up because the government MALONE: And do you - you hear of it. You took away my customers. The National Archives' Central Plains regional archives is moving into the heart of Kansas City's cultural and historic area. We can't find a market for it. The Country Club Plaza. I get in my car in my garage at home and drive underground here, so its all temperature controlled. Yeah. And though OMalleys looks normal from the outside, the inside tells another story. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE. Currently, more than 6,000,000 square feet (560,000 m2) is occupied and 8,000,000 square feet (740,000 m2) are available for future expansion. Looking for more unusual places in Missouri? Other facilities like SubTropolis exist although not on the same scale, such as the abandoned mine in Butler, Pennsylvania used by Corbis and the US Federal Government for secure storage. No purchase necessary. If you loved visiting this stunning spot, take a trip to Fisher Cave in Meramec State Park. So the clever folks at USDA said, what if we went down the supply chain one step NOVAKOVIC: And looked at dairy products that are storable? The Trump administration says today it will make an estimated $12 billion in government assistance available. In the 2000s, you could still take an official tour and potentially find a way in for a D.I.Y. The former limestone mines house about 400 businesses, many of which specialize in storage or warehousing because they are protected from extreme weather and can boast stable, year-round temperatures and humidity. But I am in favor of giving farmers an equal break. All rights reserved. More Info Directions. is cottonseed oil safe for nut allergy SNOOP DOGG: You don't buy it. Roanoke Cave . Gastro Obscura covers the worlds most wondrous food and drink. We literally paid them money to stop producing milk. BOB ASCHEBROCK: Yes. NOVAKOVIC: It was pretty hard to predict that it would get as bad as it got. But one day, the government rented out a ton of cave space, and then cheddar cheese started to show up, massive blocks of the stuff, pallet after pallet. DUFFIN: Lever 1, lower the supply - you could do what they do in Canada and say - hey, no more milk - you can only produce so much milk. does st martin parish have school tomorrow. Jimmy Carter has announced his plan to help farmers. PublishedSeptember 7, 2018 at 7:20 AM CDT. Food Caves in Missouri SubTropolis, Kansas City. 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It was a big enough number that it sounded like one of these campaign promises that you really didn't expect they would actually fulfill. He is now a dairy economist at Cornell University.