Deep underground in converted Missouri limestone mines, the United States government sits on a massive, secret stockpile of roughly 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese.

A closer look

Deep underground in converted Missouri limestone mines, the United States government sits on a massive, secret stockpile of roughly 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese. This dairy-based economic absurdity started in the 1970s when the feds aggressively bailed out struggling dairy farmers by promising to buy whatever milk they could not sell, which they then processed into enormous blocks of cheddar to prevent it from rotting. Instead of fixing the underlying supply chain issues, the government just kept hoarding dairy like a lactose-intolerant doomsday prepper, occasionally giving it away as government cheese to hide the evidence of their massive market intervention. Now we literally have a strategic cheese reserve managed by the USDA, proving that farm subsidies are less about securing the food supply and more about hiding millions of tons of cheddar in a dark cave!