During the Depression, when milk supply exceeded demand, the US government bought milk to keep its price stable and support dairy farmers. Then, trying to find a way to store or get rid of the surplus, it started stockpiling cheese, which lasts longer than milk.
The government bought so much cheese that it eventually filled every cold storage in the country. But there was still more excess milk. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) rented half an acre in a Kansas cave and filled it floor to ceiling with blocks of cheese. At its height, the US had 2lbs of stored cheese for every resident.
Eventually, the USDA turned to its nutrition programs to dispose of excess cheese. Despite most Indigenous peoples’ inability to digest milk, commodity cheese became the centerpiece of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Musician Wade Fernandez, a member of the Menominee nation, sings Commodity Cheese Blues, lamenting, “I went downtown to the commod shop / Met the blues ’cause they were out of stock. Tell me please when I’ll get my commod cheese.”
Nicknamed “pasteurized gold”, the bright orange cheese bricks sometimes operate as currency to buy other foods or goods. The irony of this treasure is not lost on critics. In 2006, an Indian Country Today article observed: “Some Lakota still say to this day that the only brick of gold the Lakota people got out of the Black Hills is the brick of cheese rationed out on commodity day.”
Funneling surplus cheese into nutrition programs like FDPIR and school lunches was not enough to save the dairy industry, which accounts for 3.5% of the US gross domestic product – half a percentage more than the auto industry. President Jimmy Carter vowed to increase the price of milk by six cents a gallon in 1977 and committed to buying as much dairy as necessary to prop up the industry. When government-purchased cheese began to mold, the plan to get it out of storage became urgent.
In 1981, a USDA official told the Washington Post: “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible … Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.”
Instead, President Reagan’s administration came up with a way to solve the problem without affecting the demand for or price of cheese. It created the Dairy Distribution Program, sending truckloads of cheese blocks to poor neighborhoods around the country.
Inevitably, government cheese entered popular culture as a marker of poverty. A series of skits on the comedy show In Living Color featured a Black version of All in the Family, a 1970s sitcom about a white working-class family. On In Living Color’s All Up in the Family, Archie comes home from work expecting Edith to have dinner waiting on the table.
ARCHIE: Edith! What’s for dinner?
EDITH: Oh, Archie, it’s your favorite! Macaroni and the government cheese!
ARCHIE: Aw, geez, Edith! You know what the government cheese does to me! I spend more time on the throne than Queen Latifah!
In a 1997 It’s Showtime at the Apollo performance, comedian Steve Harvey reminisced about eating government cheese.
“I said it right. GUV’MENT cheese. Not ‘government’ … Oh, you can’t eat a better grilled cheese than guv’ment cheese. But you got one problem. You got to cut it, though. Oh, this ain’t no Velveeta. This ain’t individually wrapped. You got to put some pressure on the butcher knife to cut some guv’ment cheese.” Harvey demonstrated by placing his knee on his hands to try to push an imaginary knife through an imaginary block of cheese.
Government cheese prompts complex responses in those who grew up eating it. In Money Trees, Kendrick Lamar raps, “Pots with cocaine residue, everyday I’m hustlin’ / What else is a thug to do when you eatin’ cheese from the government?” Jay-Z delivers a similar message in FUTW (Fuck Up the World): “After that government cheese, we eatin’ steak. / After the projects now we on estates / I’m from the bottom, I know you can relate.” In her youth, writer Bobbi Dempsey assumed the cheese was an attempt to “kill off us people on the brink by stuffing us with enough fat and cholesterol to give us heart attacks before we hit high school”.
But it also triggers feelings of nostalgia.
Donnie Wahlberg, a founding member of the boy band New Kids on the Block, owns the burger chain Wahlburgers with his brothers Mark (actor and frontliner of another 90s group, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch) and chef Paul. Donnie once shared: “We grew up on food stamps, at times on welfare, and we had to go to the government food line and get free cheese and peanut butter.” He insists “that government cheese, there’s nothing like it. For a hamburger, there’s nothing better.”
In 2014, Wahlburgers tweeted a picture of a cheeseburger captioned: “Yes, that is government cheese. That’s the way we like it. You too?” But by 2022, according to the chain’s website, Wahlburgers had switched. “Today … we use a premium American cheese to top our burgers, but give a wink and a nod to where we came from. Growing up in a house with nine kids, things were tight. Back then, blocks of cheese, known as ‘government cheese,’ were given out to folks who needed a hand up. And we were so thankful.”
Boxing promoter Joe Mora founded Chico’s Tacos, an El Paso, Texas, institution, in 1953. Chico’s signature dish is three flautas – rolled tacos or taquitos stuffed with ground beef and onions and then deep fried – bathing in a soupy tomato sauce topped with mounds of finely shredded government cheese. Mora created the dish as a teenager while caring for his siblings when his parents were at work.
A 2009 Playboy article described a midnight visit to Chico’s by city representative Susie Byrd. “The secret of Chico’s,” she told the Playboy journalist, “is I think that this might be government cheese!” City commissioner Valerie Escobar chimed in: “It’s that good welfare flavor.” Some El Pasoans criticized Escobar for the quip, which she denied making, and declared her unfit to run for county judge.
Despite negative associations between public benefits and Chico’s cheese, Chico’s devotees were outraged when Chico’s replaced it in 2016. A community petition lobbied to reinstate the old cheese. “We are begging to bring the government cheese back to make Chico’s Tacos great again.”
This passion reflects people’s complicated feelings about government cheese. Vice journalist Myles Karp noted: “There’s a special je ne sais quoi that accompanies the fact that your food is being made by Uncle Sam – often contempt or associations with hard times. Recollection of the food transcends its gustatory characteristics.”
Although commodity cheese remains a vital part of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, other forms of government cheese handouts died out at the end of the 1990s. Then, in 2016, the USDA revived the program to deal with a 1.2bn-lb dairy surplus.
A fall in demand for dairy exports collided with consolidation of the dairy industry and technology that made dairy farmers more productive. The USDA responded by buying $20m worth of cheese to give to food banks while dairy farmers dumped 43m gallons of milk down the drain.
Milk products in government programs and food banks disproportionately harm Indigenous, Black and people, who have higher rates of dairy-related health problems and program participation than white people. Almost everyone aside from Scandinavians and northern Europeans are lactose intolerant. With most of the population losing the enzyme lactase after childhood, it would be more accurate to label people who retain it “lactose persistent” instead of pathologizing its absence, which makes the white experience the baseline.
Still, at the height of the pandemic, the government dumped more and more cheese at emergency food banks – the main source of food for many Black and brown people fighting off sickness and hunger.
Source link