When Did the Government Start Powdered Milk, Peanut Butter and Cheese for Low Income Families

If y'all've ever tasted what's known as "authorities cheese," yous won't shortly forget it. Its flavour was described as somewhere betwixt Velveeta and American cheese and smacked of humiliation or gratitude for the people who couldn't beget non to swallow information technology. Its color, a pale orangish, was eye-communicable. And information technology came in iconic stacks of five-pound blocks that fabricated information technology immediately articulate it wasn't your standard cheddar or Camembert.

The cheese, distributed by a federal program during a time of volatile milk production in the 1980s recession, is iconic to this day, forming fraught memories among those who had to eat it and those who never got a taste.

The cheesy story all started in 1949, when the Agricultural Act of 1949 gave the Article Credit Corporation, a authorities-owned corporation dedicated to stabilizing subcontract incomes, the authority to purchase dairy products similar cheese from farmers. The CCC had been effectually since the Great Low, when it was created as part of the New Bargain'due south endeavour to stabilize prices and assist farmers.

During the 1970s, as Americans sat in long gas lines and watched the economy tank, they faced some other crisis: an unprecedented shortage of dairy products. In 1973, dairy prices shot up 30 percentage equally the price of other foods inflated. When the authorities tried to intervene, prices fell then low that the dairy manufacture aghast. Then, in 1977, nether President Jimmy Carter, the government set up a new subsidy policy that poured $2 billion into the dairy industry in but four years.

Suddenly, dairy farmers who had been hurting were flush with cash—and producing every bit much milk as they could in order to take reward of authorities support. The government purchased the milk dairy farmers couldn't sell and began to process it into cheese, butter and dehydrated milk powder. Every bit dairy farmers produced more and more milk, stockpiles ballooned. As anthropologist Bradley N. Jones notes, eventually the stockpile striking over 500 meg pounds, stored in hundreds of warehouses in 35 states.

Butter and cheese existence stacked and distributed during a surplus of dairy products, circa 1983. (Credit: Dave Buresh/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The huge supply was a problem, but there was another catch: The authorities had no thought what to do with all that cheese. "Probably the cheapest and most practical matter to do would exist to dump it in the ocean," a USDA official told the Washington Post in 1981. There was also confusion as to how long the candy American cheese—designed to be stored for long periods of time—really lasted.

Equally officials scrambled backside the scenes to figure out how to deal with the cheese, the cheesy puzzler became public when Agriculture Secretary John R. Block showed up at a White House event with a 5-pound block of greening, moldy cheese and showed it to the press. "We've got threescore million of these that the government owns," he said. "Information technology's moldy, information technology's deteriorating … we can't detect a market for it, we can't sell information technology, and we're looking to effort to give some of it away."

As the public got wind of the existence of all that surplus cheese, it began to sharply criticize President Ronald Reagan. He had been elected in part by bandying well-nigh inaccurate stereotypes of "welfare queens" and poor people who gamed the system, and earlier in 1981 had pledged to reduce the federal food stamp program. In that location were hungry Americans still suffering from the aftereffects of the recession. Why not give them the cheese?

In December 1981, Reagan relented. "At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure level, their government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of nutrient turn to waste material," he said in a public address. As a upshot, he said, he'd costless 30 million pounds of cheese from the country's stockpile. He created the Temporary Emergency Nutrient Help Program, which began handing out the blocks of processed cheese to the elderly, low-income people and organizations that served them.

President Reagan ordered that the surplus of cheese be held in federal storage in warehouses across the country and given to needy Americans. Here the cartons are seen in an clandestine storage warehouse nearly Kansas Urban center. (Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Now known every bit "government cheese," the pungent-smelling (and, co-ordinate to Jones, often moldy) cheese was ultimately distributed to the tune of 300 million pounds. The cheese became associated with hard times. While some were grateful, write historians Kristen Lucas and Patrice M. Buzzanel, others hated the means in which the cheese advertised their socioeconomic status.

Today, some people recall the cheese fondly. Food author Tracey Lynn Lloyd recalls how its weird texture fabricated it skillful simply for macaroni and cheese or grilled cheese sandwiches. "If someone made me a grilled cheese with government cheese today, I probably couldn't eat information technology—it would be far besides salty for my electric current taste," she writes. "But I'd nonetheless take one bite, just for the memories."

The regime finally got out of the cheese concern in the 1990s, when dairy prices calmed down again. Decades after, the CCC, the government-endemic corporation that fabricated government cheese possible, entered the news once more as the Trump administration announced it would provide large subsidies to offset the impact of its merchandise war with China, Canada and the Eu.

READ MORE: The 1980s

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/government-cheese-dairy-farmers-reagan

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