No whey!
Deep within the confines of America’s heartland lies an underground abundance of more cheese than we know what to do with.
For years, rumors have churned that a specific government surplus of the dairy product has been stored in a 3.2 million square foot cave system hidden beneath Springfield, Missouri.
Sort of like the Hangar 52 warehouse of “Indiana Jones” fame.
So, is it true — or has the truth just gotten in the way of a gouda story?
The rumored limestone caves are quite real and were initially hollowed out for the mining industry, Cornell University agricultural economics professor Andrew M. Novaković told Food and Wine.
“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,“ he said.
“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.”
The 1998 disaster movie “Deep Impact” even depicted similar caves in “the soft limestone” of the Show Me State to shield folks from an extinction event-level meteor.
And news reports have indicated that the government was, in fact, stocking the core ingredient of pizza in those sorts of facilities 40-some years ago.
It began when President Jimmy Carter allowed the dairy industry to go full speed ahead on crafting milk products around 1977, pouring $2 billion into the dairy industry over the next four years — which led to a surplus of cheese in the 1980s.
To dump the subsequent plump inventory, President Ronald Regan created a “government cheese” program for those facing food insecurity while keeping much of it below Missouri. It was something comedian Chris Farley’s character Matt Foley referenced while ranting about “living in a van down by the river” in a memorable 1993 sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”
“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,” added Novaković.
As for a 3.2 million-square-foot Springfield facility that urban legend claims to be Fort Knox for cheese in the 21st century, it is also real — but hold the government conspiracy.
Called Springfield Underground, the vast subsurface center is utilized solely by private enterprises — both Kraft Heinz and Dairy Farmers of America included — to house their cheese and several other food products.
“The [US Department of Agriculture] 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, Springfield Underground’s owner, told Food & Wine.
Still, the site is a big cheese when it comes to, well, cheese.
“That said, Springfield Underground is a critical part of our nation’s supply chain for many of our tenants’ products, including cheese,” added Angle.
