Kraft Cheese Cave, Springfield. Youll love exploring this amazing geological wonder. JUNOT DIAZ: Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. MALONE: The government of the United States of America had caves full of cheddar cheese. ASCHEBROCK: But then we had the issue with storing the stuff. 1 flavor defect he had to look out for was acidity. Some of the cave openings are so big that a big truck can get through them, while others are so tight that it would be challenging even for an earthworm to sneak through. And the United States Postal Service's Philatelic Sales Divison, the national distribution center for . Cave Tours Missouri, long known as the "Cave State," has almost 6,400 caves, and Missouri State Parks showcases four of the best for public tours. Copyright 2018 NPR. Its oddly fascinating! How would you like to work underground? There are these massive columns, and it looks like something the "Lord Of The Rings" dwarves built. Who knows? MALONE: I'm Kenny Malone. JOHN BLOCK: You see that cake of cheese? Kenny Malone has the epic tale of government cheese. Follow us on social media to add even more wonder to your day. DUFFIN: Yes, this is a real job. [2], The mine naturally maintains temperatures between 65 and 70F (18 and 21C) year-round. Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean., Instead, they decided to jettison 30 million pounds of it into welfare programs and school lunches through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. Andy Novakovic spent his summers as a kid working on his grandparents' dairy farm in Wisconsin. Oh, yeah. Get more stories delivered right to your email. Youve heard about the subterranean chamber beneath the land near Worlds of Fun, right? When maple syrup supplies run low, Canada taps into its strategic reserve. With these historical details in mind, whos to say there isnt a tunnel beneath 9th & State that was used to ferry booze between Missouri and Kansas? Over the years, the industry has found all sorts of ways to get rid of its excess supplysome more insidious than others. SNOOP DOGG: You don't buy it. Throw two tbps of butter into a pressure cooker and melt them. MALONE: You were hired as someone to show up with a metal ASCHEBROCK: Where you do quality checks on it. By Emily Baron Cadloff Global Research, May 30, 2022 Modern Farmer 25 May 2022 Region: USA Theme: Global Economy And Andy had a ringside seat to it. By clicking Sign up, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider You'll receive your first newsletter soon! Like so many things in American public policy, this traces to the New Deal, but actually goes even a little bit before that, says Andrew Novakovi, a professor of Agricultural Economics at Cornell University. DUFFIN: With a few other programs and some time, things eventually got under control, and the government put the milk support program on a kind of permanent suspension. To do so, however, required a serious upfront investment. This little-known cave area in Kansas is the perfect opportunity to explore something that many Kansans might not have heard of before. I mean, every warehouse in Wisconsin was full. MALONE: You can see pictures of the cheese cave. Follow us on Twitter to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. By: Anne D Springfield and Kansas City are not even near each other, and 435 is no where near Springfield, this article is quite confusing. Deep in converted limestone mines, caves kept perfectly at 36 degrees Fahrenheit store stockpiles of government-owned cheese comprising the country's 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese. And to be fair, it was processed cheese kind of like a brick of Velveeta. The government eventually tired of being involved in this . DUFFIN: It is this moment that government cheese truly enters the American bloodstream. And he started floating this idea. Since 1916, when James Lewis Kraft patented American cheese, the U.S. had the technology to create a cheese product that could last for years. Onandaga Cave is one of the most gorgeous underground places in Missouri. And it is also very cold - good for the government cheese, though. Springfield Underground, an Erlen Group Company is a commercial industrial park with the advantage of underground storage. Stay up to date with what you want to know. Consider supporting our work by becoming a member for as little as $5 a month. The second lesson is you got to pay attention to the unintended consequences because they can come back and bite you and bite you hard. MALONE: Bob Aschebrock spent 30 years as a USDA cheese inspector. Like, this is the original bridge to nowhere. Developed by late Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt via Hunt Midwest Real Estate Development, Inc., it has trademarked the phrase World's Largest Underground Business Complex. Its first FRC opened in 1997 beneath Lee's Summit, and another opened in 2003 under Lenexa. DAN CALLAHAN: No, I've never thought about it. Although there are around 1.4 billion pounds of excess cheese in the form of large wheels kept in cold storage limestone caves hundreds of feet below the ground outside of Springfield, Missouri just off Interstate 435, it is not all controlled by the government (only about 300 million pounds). But thats not all that was uncovered. DUFFIN: More graders grading more cheese that the government then buys. MALONE: The Trump administration announced that in order to help farmers being hurt by Trump's tariffs, the government may be making some food purchases again. Over in West Bottoms (again), 9th & State operates out of an old Pabst Brewery building on a street once known as the Wettest Block in the World. Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri. Today on the show, the story of what happened when the president of the United States decided he was going to help America's farmers by buying milk, lots of milk. Government cheese is processed cheese provided to welfare beneficiaries Food Stamp recipients and the elderly receiving Social Security in the United States as well as to food banks. One of the Heim brothers helped build a theme park there called Electric Park, which in turn gave inspiration to J. Rieger & Co.s outdoor area of the same name. There's a lot of history buried beneath Kansas City streets, from Prohibition-era passageways and underground caves to the oldest bar in Missouri. DUFFIN: OK. The Dairy Farmers of America, which has been using the facility, known as the Springfield Underground, for more than 30 years, currently has 7 million pounds of raw product.Some of this is normal inventory storage or cheese being aged. A miner from Colorado named Charles Griffee excavated these caves in the 1880s, but the land was later bought by the Faris family. The air is cool and the barroom massive almost cathedral-like. The cheese was processed and made into 2 and 5 pound bricks and given away as food aid to the poor of America. Kenny Malone hails from Meadville, PA where the zipper was invented, where Clark Gables mother is buried and where, in 2007, a wrecking ball broke free from a construction site, rolled down North Main Street and somehow wound up inside the trunk of a Ford Taurus sitting at a red light. The USDA helped "cut the glut" then by purchasing $20 million worth of fresh cheese. Then, in the 1970s, everything started to go haywire. The second lesson is you got to pay attention to the unintended consequences because they can come back and bite you and bite you hard. Cheese-makers buy more milk. (SOUNDBITE OF DROP ELECTRIC SONG, "WAKING UP TO THE FIRE"). Rather, the "caves" are part of a 3.2-million-square-foot warehouse under part of Springfield.. At Kanopolis park, near the lake of the same name, there's a short trail from a parking area that leads you through the brush into a clearing. MALONE: Now, to be fair, that's probably not enough to start filling caves again. Like SubTropolis, the strangely sterile space is separated by humungous numbered pillars. MALONE: Bob Aschebrock spent 30 years as a USDA cheese inspector. Known as the Springfield Underground, this is a cheese cave of epic proportions covering a . There is an argument that our country has to be able to produce its own food because if our farmers go out of business and we become reliant on other countries for food, then that is a kind of national security risk. MALONE: Until there was no more room for you to be in this room. KCUR serves the Kansas City region with breaking news and powerful storytelling. Over the course of the decade, inflation in the U.S. skyrocketed from 5.5 percent up to 14 percent. MALONE: So it's 1977. NOVAKOVIC: Well, I think there's two basic lessons. MALONE: Within five years, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen. https://bit.ly/2CdCooV Theorists, did you know the government is hiding caves full of cheese from us? MALONE: But this is America. Visit a sweet shop selling one of the first candies ever made and sold in America. And they go to their bosses. This area is also a great place to go hiking, camping, and fishing. San Francisco is 1 of 3 cities in which needy people lined up to get the surplus cheese. And though the world may not imagine Kansas City as big in the underground scene our ever-expanding streetcar system still operates where the sun shines the limestone around these parts was shaped by glaciers and rivers and makes for good mining. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. One of the efforts was to establish a program by which the government would guarantee a price on a handful of agricultural commodities to encourage production.. Government buys more cheese. Long situated in a warehouse-style facility far from the major business district of Kansas . This restaurant serves wood-fired fare served in a natural cave with a live spring. On a given day, kids scramble over its playground, neighbors walk their dogs through its green acres, and teens meet for pick-up games on its soccer fields and volleyball courts. It's deteriorating. At the time, the distillery offered over a hundred products, which were distributed by mail order across the country. DAN CALLAHAN: No, I've never thought about it. MALONE: This must be a common confusion in the industry. OnlyInYourState may earn compensation through affiliate links in this article. Back in the 1880s, after a year of toiling through the bluffs dividing Downtown from West Bottoms, rapid transit pioneer Robert Gillham and a team of workers managed to push the last underground bricks into place. So they created a brand-new special program to give the cheese away through food banks. Kenny Malone is a correspondent for NPR's Planet Moneypodcast. Well, we got some real crafty guys that started putting 40-pound blocks of special cheese right under the bunghole. The caves were largely abandoned after the city's building boom stopped, Hasan said. DUFFIN: And this is what people will remember as government cheese because when a government starts to give away hundreds of millions of pounds of cheese, people notice. +44 (0)7540 787812 frances@constructionandbuildingphotography.com. When Hamilton and partner Sean Smith purchased the property in 2021, they also found a locked safe and penny tile beneath green carpeting. (SOUNDBITE OF FREDERIC AUGER'S "SUNBURN"). Even after the demand for dairy declined in the wake of World War II, the program functioned reasonably well for years. The tunnel was complete, though steep, so a new one was built to weave through it at a lower grade. It sounds amazing. And in order to do. Besides those already mentioned, other businesses include Cerner, NextPage, Hallmark Cards, Hantover, Clore Automotive, and Knapheide. NOVAKOVIC: Yeah. And the Ronald Reagan team was stuck dealing with these caves full of cheese. For example, the United States Postal Service uses the space for its collectible stamp operations, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency leases spaces within for their Region-7 Training and Logistics Center. And as the historic structure theyd purchased was being repaired, Andy Rieger and crew found an eight-foot high, 400-foot-long tunnel beneath it. But their purpose has shifted over the years. Oh, boy - here we go. Government . MARTHA STEWART: Where do you buy government cheese? Very, very expensive cheese. DUFFIN: Hello. The government would buy up, say, massive amounts of corn or wheat and then just throw it into a silo until we needed it for some reason. Have you seen these caves before? The National Archives' Central Plains regional archives is moving into the heart of Kansas City's cultural and historic area. Thank you! "If they haven't been used, no one knows what state of deterioration they are in," Hasan said. 1. DUFFIN: After the break - how the government finally got out of this mess and why the government may be getting back into the cheese game. Our operators are standing by. Leading up to the Second World War, dairy was used in this very patriotic waystrengthening our bodies to fight the war.. DUFFIN: Our supervising producer is Alex Goldmark, and our editor is Bryant Urstadt. Decades of propping up the dairy industryby buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheesehad backfired, hard. Sign up for our email, delivered twice a week. HOME; INTERIORS; EXTERIORS; OFFICE & PORTRAITS; PUBLICITY/EVENTS; CONSTRUCTION; INFO If the girl's MALONE: Government cheese also shows up in tons of songs. Jimmy Carter's campaign promise to help farmers in 1976 not only gave us government cheese but also milk mustaches. It was - some of it almost taste like natural cheddar. Blackwell Motors showcases a variety of fiberglass animals, and people come from all around just to see them. The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. But this was not putting even a dent in the surplus. The Atchison Storage Facility, commonly known as the Atchison Caves is a 2.7 million square foot underground storage facility in a former pillar limestone mine 50 to 150 feet (15 to 46 m) below the ground in the Missouri River bluffs at Atchison, Kansas. Start with this beginner's guide to the neighborhood, Kansas City's new airport terminal carries on the legacy of a 10-year-old who fought for inclusivity, Local public health officials fear a Kansas bill would undercut work to contain diseases, A federal lawsuit against Missouri's 'dysfunctional' SNAP call center has gotten bigger.
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