This video is private Watch on There are several other cave warehouse locations in the U.S., including one in Bonner Springs, Kansas, Springfield, Missouri, and the the SubTropolis underground complex located in northeastern Kansas City, Missouri. Leilas Hair Museum, located in Independence, is one of the most unusual places in Missouri. You wont be bored on this one-of-a-kind road trip! BOB ASCHEBROCK: Yes. The government was demanding an unnatural amount of milk and so farmers were supplying an unnatural amount of milk. Weve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible, a USDA official was quoted as saying. MALONE: One part of the solution then was to gently get that milk supply down. Cheese Caves. : r/tumblr - Reddit DUFFIN: So the basic question was, what kinds of milk products can the government buy and store? DAN CALLAHAN: No, I've never thought about it. 2023 Atlas Obscura. During the 1980s, the U.S. government managed to offload its cheese stash. Feast Your Eyes: Kraft's Massive Underground Cheese Cave Photo - GOOD DUFFIN: In the pantheon of milk-related economic disasters, there is one that rises above the rest. It has a grid of 16ft (4.9m) high, 40ft (12m) wide tunnels separated by 25ft (7.6m) square limestone pillars created by the room and pillar method of hard rock mining. Over the course of the decade, inflation in the U.S. skyrocketed from 5.5 percent up to 14 percent. If you havent spent a day wandering the streets of Weston, Missouri, youre missing out. Thank you! Food Caves in Missouri SubTropolis, Kansas City. DUFFIN: Finding a market for this stuff is in fact a pretty fascinating puzzle because getting rid of government surplus anything is an economically tricky thing. According to The Washington Post, the U.S. has the largest domestic reserve of cheese of all varieties, including cheddar, Swiss and American . Sign up for our newsletter and enter to win the second edition of our book. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. DUFFIN: But that does not work for milk because milk starts going bad the minute it comes out of the cow. We've got 60 million of these that the government owns with mold. Consider supporting our work by becoming a member for as little as $5 a month. 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? Cave - Minecraft Wiki It was built by a German immigrant named John Georgian, who instead of relying on those trusty limestone caves weve come to know and love dug out his own brewery space beneath Weston. OnlyInYourState may earn compensation through affiliate links in this article. Why The US Government Has Kept Over 1 Billion Pounds Of Cheese In But the government then actually has to figure out a way to step into this market and make it happen. MALONE: Karen's doing the dance. MALONE: Novakovic says the government could have destroyed the cheese. Turns out, cave living is naturally energy efficient. The main brewing cellar, now outfitted with seating areas, a bar and raised stage, reaches 55 feet underground. Ever wonder what its like to work underground? 1 flavor defect he had to look out for was acidity. Trucker gives video tour of 43 million square foot 'cave - CDLLife In addition to serving as a records center, Lenexa has two archival cold storage rooms. DUFFIN: Lever 1, lower the supply - you could do what they do in Canada and say - hey, no more milk - you can only produce so much milk. That is, until last month. And it took a few years, but a flood of cheese starts to come in. ASCHEBROCK: And you insert it in through the block or the barrel or whatever. The reason why the dairy industry gets such preferential treatment is its status as this uncontested food in the diet, Wiley says. You'll receive your first newsletter soon! [4]. Extensive limestone mining in the late 1800s and early 1900s created the millions of square feet of caves that are scattered throughout metropolitan Kansas City, in Kansas and Missouri. Want more adventures like this? Steven Rodriquez/Flickr And not all of it was aging well. Big Government Cheese | Business in American History - Baylor University And there are 17 flavor defects that could happen in cheddar cheese. Pretty quickly the small opening expanded into a paved, two-lane road running through a cavern with ceilings high enough to accommodate a tractor-trailer. The cheese was processed and made into 2 and 5 pound bricks and given away as food aid to the poor of America. Born from tragedy, the remote national park is bringing tourism and other changes. Dug into the Bethany Falls limestone mine, SubTropolis is, in places, 160 feet (49m) beneath the surface. 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. Government Cheese Over the years, the government has gravitated toward one method of unloading dairy surplus: giving it to the poor. A miner from Colorado named Charles Griffee excavated these caves in the 1880s, but the land was later bought by the Faris family. ASCHEBROCK: You. 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. A slice of Kraft cheese is going to be less about. Rather, the "caves" are part of a 3.2-million-square-foot warehouse under part of Springfield.. 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. 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. The cheese came in handy for Ronald Reagan's "government cheese" program, which released 30 million pounds of the lactose-laden dairy product (paywall) to any state that applied. These are the 13 weirdest places you can possibly go in Missouri. Deep under Springfield, Missouri, lies a cheese cave of industrial proportions, a 2-million-square-foot refrigerated warehouse called Springfield Underground.Since 2008, Kraft Foods has rented . MALONE: Andy is still in the dairy world. Caves are usually found underground. I started in 1967 with the USDA, and I was hired as a cheese grader. Jimmy Carter's campaign promise to help farmers in 1976 not only gave us government cheese but also milk mustaches. Visit a sweet shop selling one of the first candies ever made and sold in America. Follow us on Twitter to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. dynamite. In the 1990s and early 2000s, even as U.S. nutritionists expressed growing concern about saturated fats and rising obesity levels, a marketing firm created and partially funded by the USDA gave millions to fast-food companies such as Taco Bell and Dominos to push them to increase the amount of cheese on menu items by as much as eightfold. Yes, the Government Really Does Stash Billions of Pounds of Cheese in How would you like to work underground? Anyway, the government had its plan in place. The same year, the USDA bought up $20 million worth of cheese to cut the glut. A native Midwesterner with a love for family, friends, and learning new things. Springfield Underground, an Erlen Group Company is a commercial industrial park with the advantage of underground storage. MALONE: Right - very, very expensive cheese. The New York Times declared that the bill would give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus.. Offer subject to change without notice. But the surplus was growing so fast that 30 million pounds barely made a dent. Known for its hiking trails (with Missouri River views), wineries and the McCormick distillery, Weston is also home to OMalleys, the oldest bar in Missouri. Get more stories delivered right to your email. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: The great cheese giveaway began today in California. The Cheesecake Factory Locations in Kansas City The 55,000,000-square-foot, 1,100-acre underground storage facility is believed to be the worlds largest site of its kind. MALONE: And then within five years, the government was spending billions of dollars filling caves with cheese that they could not get rid of fast enough. 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. 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. And what percentage of economists would you say are able to milk a cow by hand? Gastro Obscura covers the worlds most wondrous food and drink. Home; About; Gallery; Blog; Shop; Contact; My Account; Resources 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. In a blog post by writer Libbie Bond, the Deans are described as among the first in America to visualize abandoned mines as commercial real estate.. government cheese caves kansas city. Heap the flour on your countertop and make a well in the center. And before that, he was a reporter for his friend T.C. A teeny bit was allowed but not too much. We depend on ad revenue to craft and curate stories about the worlds hidden wonders. And he started floating this idea. ANDY NOVAKOVIC: Exactly. Here's a few you should know, A guide to discovering Kansas City's public art installations. Then, in the 1970s, everything started to go haywire. SubTropolis is used by around 50 businesses and organizations, for a variety of purposes. NOVAKOVIC: Butter was one, nonfat dry milk and cheese - and in particular, cheddar-type cheese. Make sure to come up for fresh air, as well as bangers and mash. That number, though, pales in. Working underground is no big deal to me, Peters says in the interview. The USDA helped "cut the glut" then by purchasing $20 million worth of fresh cheese. The National Archives Goes Underground | National Archives The tunnel was complete, though steep, so a new one was built to weave through it at a lower grade. MALONE: You were hired as someone to show up with a metal ASCHEBROCK: Where you do quality checks on it. MALONE: One of the ways Carter proposed giving farmers an equal break was to raise the price of milk by about 6 cents per gallon, which was kind of a lot at the time. This area is also a great place to go hiking, camping, and fishing. DUFFIN: And if you're a cheese seller and you hear this - that someone is going to buy your cheese at this high price - you're like, well, I'm going to sell them my crappiest cheese at that price. The four are Onondaga Cave and Cathedral Cave at Onondaga Cave State Park, Fisher Cave at Meramec State Park , and Ozark Caverns at Lake of the Ozarks State Park. MALONE: Many listeners may remember "Saturday Night Live's" Matt Foley, as played by Chris Farley, the world's worst motivational speaker. The bunker complex was a secure U.S. government storage facility from World War II until 2013. (SOUNDBITE OF DROP ELECTRIC SONG, "WAKING UP TO THE FIRE"). The Missouri River town is known for its charming main drag and castle-like college, Park University. DUFFIN: But cheese just doesn't travel well. MALONE: The idea was that if you give this food to people who suffer from food insecurity, then maybe it is going to go to somebody who wasn't going to buy cheese anyway so you're not hurting the market as much. However, as the room and pillar mining method continues to be used to extract limestone throughout the Midwest, growth of such facilities is quite possible. U.S. skyrocketed from 5.5 percent up to 14 percent, Im giving dairy farmers an equal break., boost cheese sales by more than 30 million pounds, 43 million gallons of milk down the drain, $20 million worth of cheese to cut the glut, 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in cold storage, currently has 7 million pounds of raw product, Sign up for our email, delivered twice a week. KENNY MALONE, BYLINE: The year was 1977. 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. But this was not putting even a dent in the surplus. That was pretty good. The Heim family owned property all over Kansas City at the turn of the century, including breweries called Rochester and Imperial, as well as the one in East Bottoms. government cheese caves kansas city - s208669.gridserver.com NOVAKOVIC: Well, I think there's two basic lessons. MALONE: (Laughter) And you just have a big knife. We literally paid them money to stop producing milk. Although other facilities like SubTropolis exist, there are none on the same such scale. 1 By Kimberlee N. Ried Enlarge Plan for the National Archives at Kansas City. 4701 Wyandotte Street. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: The retail price of milk is going up more than 6 cents a gallon - soon. Currently, more than 7,300,000 square feet (680,000m2) is occupied and 6,700,000 square feet (620,000m2) are available for future expansion.