Missouri’s Cheese Caves Are a Mystery

Picture it now: Hundreds of feet below the surface, converted limestone mines are home to thousands and thousands of pounds of cheese. If there’s a heaven, this might be it. But it’s off limits to mere cheese-loving mortals.

Andrew M. Novaković, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, explains that Missouri’s cheese caverns were once enormous man-made caves that were dug for mining purposes. “Once the mining operations played out, the remaining system of caverns were recognized as an opportunity for climate-controlled storage with massive holding capacity and access,“ says Novaković. “The caverns have extremely tall ceilings that are able to accommodate large tractor trailers and can run into the millions of square feet, meant for large equipment to easily drive in and around to drop their loads.”

It’s no secret: Americans love cheese. And despite a recent nod toward milk alternatives, a study from the IDFA showed cheese consumption reached an all-time high in 2022 with consumption at nearly 42 pounds per person — a half-a-pound increase over the previous year. Our history with the product runs deep and the reason we introduced caves as a means of storage is fascinating. 

The history of government cheese

In 1977, long before we had charcuterie boards dominating every Pinterest page with gooey Brie triangles and feather wheels of Manchego, then-President Jimmy Carter fulfilled his promise to prop up the dairy industry, allowing farmers to ramp up milk production without risk, and the price of milk shot up.

By the 1980s, America has a serious surplus of cheese, thanks to Carter’s dairy debacle. It sounds like a dream come true, but cheese gets moldy and goes bad. A few ideas were floated around to alleviate the load, one of which was to simply dump it into the ocean. Ultimately, then-President Ronald Regan created the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program that allocated blocks of “government cheese” to those facing food insecurity. 

Novaković says that, “When it became imperative to ‘use it or lose it’ with these cheeses, the government decided, quite logically, that the best way to use it was to make what most of us call American cheese, or processed cheese.” Here’s how it works: Conventional hard cheese is cooked and melted, sometimes with some additions for flavor or preservation. Novaković says, “The result is a very standardized and transportable ‘loaf’ of American cheese. This made it easy for the government to distribute that old surplus cheese to various local food distribution agencies.”  

Government cheese can be a polarizing topic. Take a spin around Reddit and you’ll find folks who covet the flavor, considering its taste and melting ability superior to all others. Don’t try to tell these devotees that there’s a better choice for topping a burger or using in a grilled cheese sandwich. That said, government cheese has also become the brunt of a lot of jokes. “You’re going to end up eating a steady diet of government cheese and…living in a van, down by the river,” was a wildly popular skit from the world’s-worst motivational speaker, Matt Foley on Saturday Night Live.  

The good news is that government cheese finally had options for allocation, but the bad news is that they needed a place to store the mounds and rounds. Enter: cheese caves. 

Missouri is known as “the Cave State” due to the abundant and porous limestone forming more than 7,000 caves. Novaković explains that, “A large variety of foods are stored in these caves because they are so amenable to climate control; the natural underground temperature is in the low 60s with moderate humidity. The vast majority of storage in these facilities is commercial, but the government does use them for some food storage.” 

The Hunt Midwest SubTropolis in Kansas City is located in a 270-million-year-old limestone deposit that lies 150 feet below ground. Today, the business labyrinth is home to cave-aged cheeses, coffee, and more foods.

Farther south, deep in the Ozarks, a rumor continues to swirl that below the city of Springfield has a sprawling cave of cheese, spread by Modern Farmer, for example. Natural caves such as Crystal Caves or Fantastic Caverns (claiming to be the only ride-through cave in North America) are de rigueur for the area, and a popular attraction for field trips and tourists. But this rumored cave — the cheese cave — is actually a 3.2 million-square-foot warehouse known as Springfield Underground, which opened in 1946 as a limestone quarry. Is there cheese? Yes. But what type and how much remains a mystery as the company rents storage space to private clients and debunks the myth that government cheese is hiding inside.

“The USDA is not a tenant of Springfield Underground and we do not have a pound of government-owned cheese,” Christina Angle, CFO for the Erlen Group, told Food & Wine. “That said, Springfield Underground is a critical part of our nation’s supply chain for many of our tenants’ products, including cheese.”

How do I visit a cheese cave?

There are no known Missouri cheese caves open to consumers. You may have to cross the pond to the world-famous cheddar cheese caves to see and taste underground cheese aging firsthand. It’s surely superior to government cheese.