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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. What are the most unusual places in Missouri? MALONE: And so our country has a tradition of programs to help farmers. SubTroplis is definitely one of the most incredible underground places in Missouri. MALONE: Right - very, very expensive cheese. However, when Prohibition was enacted in 1919 via the 18th Amendment, the alcohol purveyor shut its doors. This was generally the approach that we would use to support other kinds of farm industries. NOVAKOVIC: You can imagine the cheese company that's in the business of selling cheese is going to say, hey, what's the deal here? I am in an old, converted limestone mine. ASCHEBROCK: Nope. Unfortunately, your shopping bag is empty. NOVAKOVIC: So you can imagine, you know, you don't just kind of roll down one of these barrels down Seventh Avenue in New York City and say, anybody want some cheese? DUFFIN: Hello. (Shouting) Government cheese. MALONE: So it's 1977. 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. MALONE: So if you wanted to sell cheese to the government, Bob would show up with this, like, hollow rod called a cheese trier. The easier solution - maybe - the government could just start buying a ton of milk themselves. They are open spaces of various sizes and shapes that often intersect with each another or with different generated structures, creating vast cave systems. DUFFIN: But the problem, Andy says, was that a lot of this was not easy-to-give-away cheese. The underground industrial park known as SubTroplis opened for business in 1964 in an excavated mine below Kansas City, Mo., attracting tenants with the lure of lower energy costs and cheap rents . Add 16 oz of macaroni, or shells to the pressure cooker and enough water to cover the noodles completely. You took away my customers. MALONE: Government cheese became a symbol of a crappy government handout. Thank you! Missouri's caves can . The guaranteed milk price, which had been going up automatically every six months, was eventually frozen. Well, we got some real crafty guys that started putting 40-pound blocks of special cheese right under the bunghole. In fact, it has trademarked the phrase "World's Largest Underground Business Complex." 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. Its at the same park! Even after the demand for dairy declined in the wake of World War II, the program functioned reasonably well for years. How would you like to work underground? NOVAKOVIC: It's really hard to balance what you want to do socially or politically with what you can get away with economically. But that does not mean the government had fixed the problem. NOVAKOVIC: Well, probably, you know, close to a hundred percent are able. So how in the world did the U.S. end up with a mountain of slowly molding cheese? The federal government has been storing paperwork in these caves for nearly 25 years. We hope so. (SOUNDBITE OF DROP ELECTRIC SONG, "WAKING UP TO THE FIRE"). At the time, the distillery offered over a hundred products, which were distributed by mail order across the country. That number, though, pales in. In 2016, dairy farmers resorted to simply dumping 43 million gallons of milk down the drain. DUFFIN: This is a basic supply-and-demand problem. DUFFIN: Nevertheless, when Carter got elected, he goes all in. Get more stories delivered right to your email. MALONE: You were hired as someone to show up with a metal ASCHEBROCK: Where you do quality checks on it. Ashley Day. The Missouri River town is known for its charming main drag and castle-like college, Park University. ASCHEBROCK: You. DUFFIN: Our supervising producer is Alex Goldmark, and our editor is Bryant Urstadt. SubTropolis, a 55 million-square-foot limestone cave which houses a range of businesses underground in Kansas City. Even the beverage distributors, they had cheese in the storage. And to be fair, it was processed cheese kind of like a brick of Velveeta. We are @planetmoney. Lets just call it tunnel vision. Share your experiences in the comment section below. Try the frozen treat that inspired Arrested Development's famous banana stand. Expand All. By Emily Baron Cadloff Global Research, May 30, 2022 Modern Farmer 25 May 2022 Region: USA Theme: Global Economy AUDIE CORNISH, BYLINE: The White House is coming to the aid of farmers hurt by its own hard-line trade policies. This little-known cave area in Kansas is the perfect opportunity to explore something that many Kansan's might not have heard of before. MALONE: Dan says that the cheese took up about half an acre of space. DUFFIN: OK. Thanks for listening. SNOOP DOGG: You don't buy it. And though OMalleys looks normal from the outside, the inside tells another story. DUFFIN: By the early 1980s, the dairy support program was costing taxpayers around $2 billion a year. In fact, he remembers the exact room it went into. SubTropolis is a ginormous man-made cave in the bluffs above the Missouri River in Kansas City. But this is what gave us, you know, the got milk and the milk mustache and all those kind of iconic programs that we remember. Oh, yeah. Have you seen these caves before? As a busy mother of one crazy kid, two cats, and two geckos, they write whenever there is spare time. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE MAY 21, 2022, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURAS FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. And what percentage of economists would you say are able to milk a cow by hand? Weve written about the 8th Street Tunnel before, and who can blame us? Currently 5,000,000 square feet is occupied and 10,000,000 square feet are "improved.". Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. I mean, it was really, really good product. MALONE: Bob Aschebrock spent 30 years as a USDA cheese inspector. KCUR serves the Kansas City region with breaking news and powerful storytelling. Its first FRC opened in 1997 beneath Lee's Summit, and another opened in 2003 under Lenexa. CALLAHAN: So you'd be - it's 17 feet, 16 feet. Kraft Foods, the multinational conglomerate that makes countless grocery products in addition to cheese, is about none of that, however. Government cheese arrived at our home in enormous uncut yellow blocks wrapped in white nondescript cardboard. MALONE: The theory was that if you give cheese away to people who can't afford it, then you're not stealing business from real cheese sellers. It's only about a 3-inch-in-diameter hole. But the government then actually has to figure out a way to step into this market and make it happen. We are not a government facility, but rather a multi-generational family business . So getting people to do it was always a challenge. The former limestone mines house about 400 businesses, many of which specialize in storage or warehousing because they are protected from extreme weather and can boast stable, year-round temperatures and humidity. YOU CAN, Argentina's El Impenetrable Opens Up New Options For Its People, How Laos Got Its First Buffalo Dairy Farm, How the Capones Strong-Armed Their Way Into the Dairy Business, The French Art of Cheese-Label Collecting, The Last Cheesemakers of the Eastern Himalayas, Show & Tell: Inside a House of Hot Sauce With Vic Clinco, The Secret to China's Bounciest Meatballs. And thus, you won't be flooding anyone's market. 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. This story was first published in KCUR's Creative Adventure newsletter. At one point, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen. There were 40-pound blocks and 500-pound barrels. DUFFIN: Government cheese starts to show up in all kinds of popular culture. 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. It is more than a food that. 1. MALONE: At one point, Donnie Wahlberg of the New Kids On The Block said, quote, "there's nothing like it. Looking for more unusual places in Missouri? Government buys more cheese. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. By clicking Sign up, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider MALONE: Even if that bite just looks like some delicious cheese. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: That's government cheese. A teeny bit was allowed but not too much. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. SUBSCRIBE for Every Delicious Theory! ANDY NOVAKOVIC: Exactly. 's homemade newspaper, Neighborhood News. 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. But milk doesn't store well, so the government bought other dairy products. MALONE: Bob Aschebrock spent 30 years as a USDA cheese inspector. Now heres a story that comes full circle. 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. It is estimated that Kansas has more than 700 and caves, and almost 350 are in the Red Hills. Offer subject to change without notice. DUFFIN: It's one thing for politicians to say, we want the price of milk to go up. Jimmy Carter was running for president. The reason why the dairy industry gets such preferential treatment is its status as this uncontested food in the diet, Wiley says. And it's the most government packaging you will ever see - just, like, brown cardboard, some black USDA stamps on it. DUFFIN: But that does not work for milk because milk starts going bad the minute it comes out of the cow. Lawmakers worried that any blow to the nations dairy farmers could lead to drastic shortages down the line. 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. Last year, the U.S. produced nearly 12 billion pounds of cheese -- an all-time high, according to the USDA. MALONE: That did some good. Lamar Hunt, the late founder of the Kansas City Chiefs, is perhaps the most well-known of the cave developers. 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? 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. While the government-owned cheese hoards of the 1970s and 80s are largely a thing of the past, the U.S. has still never really figured out what to do with its excess dairy. We use to plug through that bunghole to get our sample. Offer available only in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico). A cave (also known as a cavern) is a common terrain feature that generates in the Overworld and the Nether. DUFFIN: You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook - also @planetmoney. Anyway, whats weird is that Peters talks about working beneath Park University in a limestone cave. So just wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling CALLAHAN: Floor to ceiling, and then as you kept filling it, you just worked your way right back out. It's got its flaws. Many tenants at . SubTropolis is a 55,000,000-square-foot (5,100,000 m 2), 1,100-acre (4.5 km 2) artificial cave in the bluffs above the Missouri River in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, that is claimed to be the world's largest underground storage facility.Developed by late Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt via Hunt Midwest Real Estate Development, Inc., it has trademarked the phrase World's Largest . Its existence serves as a reminder of Kansas Citys knack for innovative transportation especially as new railways for the streetcar go down all along Main Street. 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. Like anything you grow up with and then lose subsequently access to, government cheese is parked in a prominent spot in the memories of its former consumers. KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) A mother is in custody after her two children were found barefoot, dirty, and living in a wooden shipping crate in an underground cave part of a massive subterranean network carved out beneath Kansas City. Accuracy and availability may vary. Behold the power of cheese. If the girl's MALONE: Government cheese also shows up in tons of songs. Weve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible, a USDA official was quoted as saying. MALONE: Today's episode was produced by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Nick Fountain and Rhaina Cohen. NOVAKOVIC: Yeah. We know there are a few places where youre allowed to explore public caves, but theyre sometimes hard to find or access. And as of March 31, the U.S. still has 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in cold storageonly now its owned by private companies. MALONE: One part of the solution then was to gently get that milk supply down. The cheese was processed and made into 2 and 5 pound bricks and given away as food aid to the poor of America. SubTropolis is a ginormous man-made cave in the bluffs above the Missouri River in Kansas City. Kansas City even has special ordinances that govern the use of underground space, including how the roofs must be supported, and about 3,000 to 4,000 people work full-time in the cave system, Hasan said. The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. 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. And not all of it was aging well. JAY-Z: (Rapping) After that government cheese, we eatin' steak. Before that, he was a reporter for WNYC's Only Humanpodcast. It is huge. BOB ASCHEBROCK: Yes. 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. DUFFIN: So much cheese that Bob starts having to spend more and more time on the road because he has to actually go to the cheese to grade it. Sign up for notifications from Insider! You may wonder why the government has a massive cheese stockpile. The idea of "government cheese" is an enduring blip in the American psyche. And Andy had a ringside seat to it. 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. Well, sort of. glimpse into the void but a modern-day viewing is near-impossible. Like SubTropolis, the strangely sterile space is separated by humungous numbered pillars. ASCHEBROCK: I'm not running down Velveeta, but I'll tell you, the government processed loaf was 10 times - 100 times better. The walls themselves are limestone, of course. In 1976, Jimmy Carter got on a stage and said something seemingly innocuous. 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 . give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus., exactly popular with all of its recipients. A slice of Kraft cheese is going to be less about. We can't find a market for it. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Original reels of Hollywood blockbusters "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone with the Wind" are stored in the caves. Imagine watching lines of people wait around to be handed a giant block of moldy, bright orange cheese. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. SubTropolis is used by around 50 businesses and organizations, for a variety of purposes. You may even encounter some paranormal activity while youre exploring. 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. Posted on June 16, 2022 by June 16, 2022 by Home; About; Gallery; Blog; Shop; Contact; My Account; Resources MALONE: Within five years, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen. Love Kansas? Copyright 2018 NPR. Either one should get you a higher price. NOVAKOVIC: As you can imagine, the cheese company that's in the business of selling cheese is going to say - hey, what's the deal here? JOHN BLOCK: You see that cake of cheese? Who knows? government cheese caves kansas city And do you, like, smack your forehead? DUFFIN: Or you can try to get your surplus goods to people who were not going to buy it anyway. Although other facilities like SubTropolis exist, there are none on the same such scale. But the bite came in terms of how much it cost for that opportunity. Each week, KCUR's Adventure! 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. The government eventually tired of being involved in this . 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. About 3.2 acres of available space are added each year as active mining continues. The United States Postal Service and the United States Environmental Protection Agency lease spaces within SubTropolis, the United States Postal Service for its collectible stamp operations and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for their Region-7 Training and Logistics Center. DUFFIN: So the basic question was, what kinds of milk products can the government buy and store? To learn more about the best caves in Missouri, read our article here. It has a grid of 16 feet high, 40 foot wide tunnels separated by 25 foot square limestone pillars created by the room and pillar method of hard rock mining. MALONE: This must be a common confusion in the industry. We depend on ad revenue to craft and curate stories about the worlds hidden wonders. An eye-opening journey through the history, culture, and places of the culinary world. 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. Help yourself. That is, until last month. But their purpose has shifted over the years. That was pretty good. It was a big enough number that it sounded like one of these campaign promises that you really didn't expect they would actually fulfill. "If they haven't been used, no one knows what state of deterioration they are in," Hasan said. Government Cheese Over the years, the government has gravitated toward one method of unloading dairy surplus: giving it to the poor. ASCHEBROCK: Will eat any cheese. Jimmy Carter has announced his plan to help farmers. It certainly was on the edge of that. Steven Rodriquez/Flickr And so they try to hire more cheese graders. 41, no. Then, in the 1970s, everything started to go haywire. [4]. [3] The National Archives and Records Administration also leases space for a Federal Records Center. The government has tended to stay away from buying cheese as a solution. The National Archives' Central Plains regional archives is moving into the heart of Kansas City's cultural and historic area. And you can drive your car right into it. Follow us on social media to add even more wonder to your day. The Trump administration says today it will make an estimated $12 billion in government assistance available. 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. warehouses in Germany, Belgium, and France. Before that, he was a reporter for Miami's WLRN. Yes, that is a lot of cheese. Like, this is the original bridge to nowhere. Layer by Layer: A Mexico City Culinary Adventure, Sacred Granaries, Kasbahs and Feasts in Morocco, Monster of the Month: The Hopkinsville Goblins, Writing the Food Memoir: A Workshop With Gina Rae La Cerva, Reading the Urban Landscape With Annie Novak, How to Grow a Dye Garden With Aaron Sanders Head, Making Scents: Experimental Perfumery With Saskia Wilson-Brown, Indigenous Desserts of Turtle Island With Mariah Gladstone, University of Massachusetts Entomology Collection, The Frozen Banana Stands of Balboa Island, The Paratethys Sea Was the Largest Lake in Earths History, How Communities Are Uncovering Untold Black Histories, The Medieval Thieves Who Used Cats, Apes, and Turtles as Accomplices, THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE MAY 21, 2022, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURAS FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. But here is why government cheese has become a kind of parable of how government intervention in markets can have this, like, butterfly effect. The best hidden gems and little known destinations - straight to your inbox. MALONE: The government asked economists, including Andy Novakovic, to figure out how it could get out of the cheese buying business without devastating the farmers they were trying to help in the first place. Westons downtown district was established in 1837, so theres a lot of history here. Winner will be selected at random on 04/01/2023. China props up pork prices by buying surplus for its frozen pork reserve. Today, the government still buys and stores cheese for food assistance programs; however, only about 300 . MALONE: Yes. 1 flavor defect he had to look out for was acidity. And it took a few years, but a flood of cheese starts to come in. 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. MALONE: Right. NOVAKOVIC: The federal government wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with tanker loads of milk. DUFFIN: OK. Jimmy Carter's campaign promise to help farmers in 1976 not only gave us government cheese but also milk mustaches. Using Kansas City's underground caves to age cheese could be boon to region's cheese makers It still didn't seem right but I went ahead and drove into the cave. As strange as this predicament might seem, the U.S. is far from the only country to artificially stabilize agricultural prices by stockpiling food products. I can tell you what we had to reject it for - flat, bitter, yeasty, malty, old milk, fruity MALONE: That sounds lovely. Every weekday we compile our most wondrous stories and deliver them straight to you. And the resulting demand just pushes the price of milk up. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: The retail price of milk is going up more than 6 cents a gallon - soon. Government agents were in uncharted territory. 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.. The 55,000,000-square-foot, 1,100-acre underground storage facility is believed to be the worlds largest site of its kind. There was an incredible press conference where Agriculture Secretary John Block went before reporters and held up a giant hunk of cheese like it was a national emergency. Kansas City Chiefs Home: The official source of the latest Chiefs news, videos, photos, tickets, rosters, and gameday information Remember Government cheese? ASCHEBROCK: It was 10 times better than - I hate - you know, Velveeta is OK. Government . SNOOP DOGG: Martha's never had a bite of government cheese in her life. MALONE: Again, our dairy economist Andy Novakovic. And in order to do this, they have to be willing to buy all of the cheese that anybody wants to sell them at this price. Let us know. In fact, if you see my shape, you would know that I eat enough to keep the tank full. Along with Congress, Carter wanted to raise the price of milk 6 cents per gallon and keep raising it with inflation. ASCHEBROCK: There is a bung - what they call a bunghole up on the top. In response to this dairy shortage and 30% inflation . Central Plains Regional Archives Moves to Historic Downtown Location Spring 2009, vol. I mean, every warehouse in Wisconsin was full. You cansign up to receive stories like this in your inbox every Tuesday. ASCHEBROCK: Now, I'm not sure if you know - if you've ever seen a 500-pound steel barrel of cheese. To get some of that cheese off the market, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent $47.1 million buying up roughly 22. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. You've got to be on they special mailing list. The two larger caves were used by the Faris family as a spring house, generator room and, a schoolhouse as well. Limestone caves in the Kansas City area have been used to store immigration records for years. (Dean Russell/Here & Now) This article is more than 4 years old. Leilas Hair Museum, located in Independence, is one of the most unusual places in Missouri. 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.