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Cheese mountains, milk lakes, and other surprising stockpiles
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On the surface, Springfield, Missouri, looks like an ordinary city. Yet underneath, in a containment facility hidden in the hollows of former limestone mines, lie stacks upon stacks of industrial barrels. Their contents: hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese.
This immense mound of dairy is only part of the 1.4 billion pounds the U.S. government has amassed over the last century. Essentially all of this is in the form of commodity cheese, a highly processed product sometimes referred to as “government cheese.”
As bizarre as the American cheese mountain may be, it’s far from the only gastronomic stockpile scattered around the globe. Some have become peculiar points of national pride: When the Swiss government announced that it would do away with the country's 15,000-tonne coffee stash, the public outcry was immediate.
Other food reserves have become politically weaponized or endlessly ridiculed. As The Washington Post reported in 1981, one USDA official suggested that the most practical option would be for the U.S. government to just fling its cheese hoard into the sea.
Here are some of the largest—and strangest—caches of food in the world.
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The United States’ Cheese Mountain
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Demand for dairy in the U.S. has plummeted 42 percent since 1975, but that hasn’t stopped American farmers from producing more and more of it. Over the years, the industry has found all sorts of ways to get rid of its excess supply, from dumping 43 million gallons of milk to stockpiling cheese.
“The reason why the dairy industry gets such preferential treatment is its status as this uncontested food in the diet,” says Dr. Andrea Wiley, author of Re-Imagining Milk. With the rise of refrigeration in the early 1900s, the dairy industry consolidated and grew more powerful.
“Basically the dairy industry was looking to expand its market, and the USDA was looking to expand the agricultural economy, and they become very intertwined,” Wiley says.
By the 1930s and ‘40s, milk was touted as essential for both growing children and adults. “Leading up to the Second World War, dairy was used in this very patriotic way—strengthening our bodies to fight the war,” Wiley says. “Then in the wake of the Second World War, [demand for milk] began to decline. So you have this super robust dairy industry, but the market can’t absorb it.”
In 1949, the Agricultural Act allowed a government agency to buy up dairy products to stabilize prices. Within 30 years, a modest stash ballooned to more than 500 million pounds of cheese. Under the Reagan Administration, the USDA dumped 30 million pounds of commodity cheese on welfare programs and into school lunches.
Yet this Special Dairy Distribution Program barely made a dent. Partnerships with fast-food companies like Taco Bell and Domino’s—which a government agency paid millions to make cheesier products—helped, but still weren’t enough.
In 2016, the government scooped up another $20 million worth of cheese and the stockpile grew larger still under the Trump Administration. Today, cheese mountain is bigger than ever.
“We’re still dealing with wartime policies [even though] we haven’t had a World War in over 70 years,” Wiley says. “They’re kind of just stuck with a lot of really bad cheese.”
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Europe’s Butter Mountains and Milk Lakes
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Europe has also been propping up its dairy industry for decades, to the extent that it's been a sticking point for conservative British politicians from Margaret Thatcher to various Brexiteers. By 1984, outrage over government-subsidized “butter mountains” and “milk lakes” led lawmakers to introduce a dairy cap.
Much like America’s cheese mountain, the European Union’s mountains and lakes of dairy aren’t literal. Instead, most of the milk lakes exist in the form of sacks upon sacks of dehydrated skim milk powder languishing in warehouses in Germany, Belgium, and France.
While the EU swore they’d put a stop to this, these stockpiles have still grown at times. In the wake of a market crisis in 2015, the Agriculture Commission doled out more than €1 billion in aid to dairy farmers, approximately €640 million of which went to purchase skim milk powder.
Predictably, people were not happy. Politicians vowed to get rid of it and, for the time being at least, most of the supplies have dwindled. Now the wine lakes, on the other hand …
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China’s Frozen Pork Reserve
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Canada’s Maple Syrup Reserve
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Of course Canada has a Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. Quebec is responsible for 73 percent of the world’s maple syrup, more than half of which winds up in the United States. And unlike a moldering pile of cheese, the saccharine stash is treated like liquid gold.
It’s so valuable, in fact, that thieves made off with 9,571 barrels—or 2,700 metric tonnes—of the stuff in 2012. The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, as it came to be known, amounted to $18 million in pilfered tree sap.
Not all Canadian maple syrup harvesters are thrilled about the government’s policies, which strictly regulate how much product they can sell. Still, that extra supply comes in handy. In 2021, after an alarmingly low harvest, the government released more than 22,600 metric tonnes of maple syrup from its precious supply to make up the difference.
Fortunately, there’s still plenty to go around. Canada’s maple syrup trove is vast, with dimensions equivalent to five football fields. Given that climate change is expected to impact maple syrup production, those supplies may soon be more valuable than ever.
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Sacred Granaries, Kasbahs, and Feasts in Morocco
On this Gastro Obscura trip, you will participate in North African culinary traditions and see the historic sites that shaped them, including an overlooked wonder of the world, the Amtoudi Granary, a fortress-like food vault and an early form of banking that once served as a crossroads of culinary tradition for the Berber people.Book Today
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