The US government hides 1,322 million lbs of cheese in secret caves and no one knows their location
Hundreds of feet underground, the US is sitting on billions of pounds of government-owned cheese.
It sounds like an urban legend, but it’s true — beneath parts of the United States, in old limestone mines and converted storage caverns, sits one of the strangest government stockpiles in the world: more than 600 million kilograms of cheese (1.4 billion pounds). The so-called "government cheese caves" trace their origins to the 1970s, when inflation and a nationwide dairy shortage left the US struggling to stabilize food prices.
As per IFL Science, under President Jimmy Carter, the government poured nearly $2 billion into the dairy industry to encourage production, and the plan worked — too well. Farmers began churning out more milk and cheese than the country could possibly consume, knowing that the government would buy the surplus. By the early 1980s, the US Department of Agriculture found itself sitting on roughly 500 million pounds of cheese stored in more than 150 warehouses across 35 states. Anthropologist Bradley N. Jones wrote in "The Oxford Companion to Cheese" that it was one of the most unusual storage programs ever undertaken by the US government.
The press picked up on the story, and the piles of dairy soon became both a scandal and a punchline. In 1981, Agriculture Secretary John R. Block arrived at the White House carrying a five-pound block of molding cheese. "We’ve got 60 million of these that the government owns," he told reporters. "It’s moldy, it’s deteriorating… we can’t find a market for it, we can’t sell it, and we’re looking to give some of it away." President Ronald Reagan soon launched the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program, distributing more than 30 million pounds of government cheese through food banks and community centers.
It became a staple in low-income households — blocky, bright orange, and synonymous with hard times. References to "government cheese" eventually turned up in songs by Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar, and even in Snoop Dogg’s cooking segment with Martha Stewart. By the 1990s, the government finally got out of the cheese business. But in 2016, the story repeated itself. The US again began buying up surplus dairy, and the national stockpile ballooned to 1.4 billion pounds stored underground in converted limestone mines in Missouri and beyond. The caves are kept at a steady 36°F — the perfect temperature to preserve the cheese for years. A Snopes investigation confirmed that the cheese caves are real, even if no one knows exactly where all of it is stored.
The new hoard is the result of the same forces that created the first: overproduction and declining consumption. Milk sales have dropped from 275 pounds per person in 1975 to just 149 pounds in 2017, but production has climbed steadily. Between 2016 and 2017, the dairy industry received over $70 billion in subsidies, with nearly half of producers’ revenue now tied to government aid. Much of that funding comes through the dairy lobby, which directs billions to major corporations while smaller farms struggle to stay afloat.
To help move the product, the USDA-backed Dairy Management Inc., created in the 1990s with a $140 million annual budget, continues to push dairy marketing campaigns. According to The Farmlink Project, it created the "Got Milk?" ads, added extra cheese to Taco Bell’s menu, and even funded a Domino’s Pizza bailout in 2010 to increase cheese use. But as consumption declines, the problem grows, and so does the environmental toll. The dairy industry contributes heavily to methane emissions, while overproduction has led to millions of gallons of dumped milk.
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