government cheese caves kansas city

NARA Is Up to Date in Kansas City | National Archives ASCHEBROCK: And that's what you grade. Cave cheese is any cheese that is ripened within a cave or cave-like environment, where consistently low temperatures and high levels of humidity are perfect for supporting the chemical reactions that take place in the cheese aging process. BOB ASCHEBROCK: Yes. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MARTHA AND SNOOP'S POTLUCK DINNER PARTY"). There's a lot of history buried beneath Kansas City streets, from Prohibition-era passageways and underground caves to the oldest bar in Missouri. Kansas City Chiefs Home: The official source of the latest Chiefs news, videos, photos, tickets, rosters, and gameday information Remember Government cheese? 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. A native Midwesterner with a love for family, friends, and learning new things. According to the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the space was once also a limestone mine. The surplus dairy products now in storage have a market value of $3 billion. 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. [2], The mine naturally maintains temperatures between 65 and 70F (18 and 21C) year-round. In addition to serving as a records center, Lenexa has two archival cold storage rooms. Kansas City Underground | Visit KC MALONE: Right - very, very expensive cheese. MALONE: Within five years, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen. +44 (0)7540 787812 frances@constructionandbuildingphotography.com. ANDY NOVAKOVIC: Exactly. Central Plains Regional Archives Moves to Historic Downtown Location Spring 2009, vol. The government tiptoed back into the cheese business in 2019 when the Trump administration said it was using the CCC program again to provide large subsidies to offset the effects of its trade. Born and raised Kansan, Clarisa has lived in both tiny towns and cities during their time here in the Sunflower State. DUFFIN: Bob's job was to make sure that all of the cheese met USDA grade A cheddar standards - the right moisture level, the proper shade of yellowish-orange, the correct flavor profile. Sprawling beneath 31st Street (and beyond) for more than two million square feet, the nations first subterranean business park was blasted into existence by prolific businessmen Lester Dean Sr. and Lester Dean Jr. We say blasted because in 1973, the duo expanded an existing mine on the property using what else? 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. He is now a dairy economist at Cornell University. Throw two tbps of butter into a pressure cooker and melt them. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. There's also a trail leading to the top of the area above the caves if you want to keep going! I am in an old, converted limestone mine. DUFFIN: Yes, this is a real job. DUFFIN: By the early 1980s, the dairy support program was costing taxpayers around $2 billion a year. The Cheese Grotto isn't just about cheese storageit also allows you to age cheese at home. Heap the flour on your countertop and make a well in the center. We don't do milk quotas - no Lever 1. Today, the National Archives has four underground facilities. Follow us on social media to add even more wonder to your day. DUFFIN: Just this week, we finally learned some of the details. NOVAKOVIC: It's really hard to balance what you want to do socially or politically with what you can get away with economically. Currently, more than 6,000,000 square feet (560,000 m2) is occupied and 8,000,000 square feet (740,000 m2) are available for future expansion. Nevertheless, dairy surpluses still very much exist. 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. Now heres a story that comes full circle. Springfield's "cheese caves" aren't natural caves like Fantastic Caverns or Crystal Cave. At one point, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen. Roanoke Cave . The 43,000,000 square feet structure is owned by Americold and is primarily used for food production. 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. "Kansas City is a world leader in the use of underground space for human occupancy," he said. honolulu police department records; spiritual meaning of the name ashley; mississippi election results 2021; charlie spring and nick nelson Turns out, cave living is naturally energy efficient. And so they try to hire more cheese graders. (SOUNDBITE OF FREDERIC AUGER'S "SUNBURN"). HOME; INTERIORS; EXTERIORS; OFFICE & PORTRAITS; PUBLICITY/EVENTS; CONSTRUCTION; INFO Known as the Springfield Underground, this is a cheese cave of epic proportions covering a . A grader, where you do quality checks on it. DUFFIN: This was not just political pandering. Start with this beginner's guide to the neighborhood, 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, Escape your house with this list of outdoor adventures around Kansas City, Kick off your summer with outdoor music and movies in Kansas City, Kansas City is home to a lot of offbeat and fun museums. NOVAKOVIC: The federal government wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with tanker loads of milk. 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. The new iteration of J. Rieger & Co. and what would become a tasting room, lounge, speakeasy and outdoor beer garden began taking shape in 2014. Park University in the Kansas City suburb of Parkville has dozens of classrooms and offices in the caves and rents out other underground space to businesses. (SOUNDBITE OF DROP ELECTRIC SONG, "WAKING UP TO THE FIRE"). Want to explore Waldo? Offer subject to change without notice. Trucker gives video tour of 43 million square foot 'cave - CDLLife NOVAKOVIC: Exactly. Sign up for KCUR's Creative Adventure Email. How would you like to work underground? Old Kansas City Limestone Mines Home To Everything From Pickup - WBUR It was ready to start buying cheese. There are so many incredible abandoned businesses in Missouri. 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. Today, the government still buys and stores cheese for food assistance programs; however, only about 300 . But milk doesn't store well, so the government bought other dairy products. Fortunately, the rock here is soft enough to scratch something out without a lot of effort. So the clever folks at USDA said, what if we went down the supply chain one step NOVAKOVIC: And looked at dairy products that are storable? Secretive Experiences Sample spirits made by S.D. Looking for more unusual places in Missouri? 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. And the resulting demand just pushes the price of milk up. MALONE: Until there was no more room for you to be in this room? MALONE: That is right. Have you been inside? Gastro Obscura covers the worlds most wondrous food and drink. MALONE: This is a cave full of cheese in Kansas City. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE"). MALONE: You can see pictures of the cheese cave. Metallic, sour, whey taint, weedy, onion, barny, lipase and sulfide. 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. 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: Until there was no more room for you to be in this room. Anyway, the government had its plan in place. MALONE: Bob says the No. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Long situated in a warehouse-style facility far from the major business district of Kansas . The Missouri River town is known for its charming main drag and castle-like college, Park University. So the thing that the government was concerned about is what's called commercial displacement. San Francisco is one of three cities in which needy people lined up to get the surplus cheese. USDA Keeps 1.4 Billion Pounds of Cheese in Missouri Caves - Newser If the girl's MALONE: Government cheese also shows up in tons of songs. And so they pass a law saying that they want the price of milk to go up automatically every six months. Visitors to the underworld will even find a whiskey distillery within the mined area, which stretches for more than 1 million square feet. Limestone mine in the bluffs above the Missouri River in Kansas City, MO, US, Learn how and when to remove this template message, United States Environmental Protection Agency, National Archives and Records Administration, "SubTropolis | Industrial Space for Lease in Kansas City", "Bloomberg.com 2015-02-04 Welcome to Subtropolis The Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City", "Archives.gov 2018-02-26 Kansas City, MO Federal Records Center", SubTropolis Technology Center home site (Hunt Midwest), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SubTropolis&oldid=1140599869, Buildings and structures in Kansas City, Missouri, Articles lacking in-text citations from January 2020, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia cave articles with unreferenced coordinates, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 20 February 2023, at 21:12. MALONE: So it's 1977. But thats not all that was uncovered. kansas | Cheese Cave Missouri has 7,000 caves. Here's a guide to some of the best | The Its more than a hobby, its a passion.. PHIL HARTMAN: (As character) Matt, we're ready for you. Every weekday we compile our most wondrous stories and deliver them straight to you. MALONE: Dan Callahan worked here in the 1970s and says one day, the U.S. government rented a ton of cave space, and a ton of cheddar cheese started to show up. There's something instinctive in us that makes us want to leave a mark on the world. It was created by digging into the Bethany Falls limestone mine and is, in places, 160 feet beneath the surface. "If they haven't been used, no one knows what state of deterioration they are in," Hasan said. On the north edge of the complex Hunt developed the Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun amusement park complex. That was pretty good. This area is also a great place to go hiking, camping, and fishing. They actually had to rent out space in multiple caves. 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. I mean, every warehouse in Wisconsin was full. Dug into the Bethany Falls limestone mine, SubTropolis is, in places, 160 feet (49m) beneath the surface. DUFFIN: Or you can try to get your surplus goods to people who were not going to buy it anyway. Home; About; Gallery; Blog; Shop; Contact; My Account; Resources In 1887, J. Rieger & Co. distillers of top-notch whiskey, vodka and gin put down roots in the Livestock Exchange district of West Bottoms. And the Ronald Reagan team was stuck dealing with these caves full of cheese. As we unloaded the caves full of this stuff, government cheese started to show up everywhere - food banks and schools, military mess halls. 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. MALONE: Again, economist Andy Novakovic. 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. SNOOP DOGG: Martha's never had a bite of government cheese in her life. The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Cheese-makers buy more milk. (SOUNDBITE OF KAZAM'S "ROMANTIQUE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. 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. Out of 25 buildings, a whopping 24 were saloons. In addition, the Federal Government will spend $40 million to $50 million this year to transport even more dairy . NOVAKOVIC: Well, probably, you know, close to a hundred percent are able. [4]. 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. While many of the caves feature paved roads and utilities, other areas consist of dirt floors and uncontrolled entrances. does st martin parish have school tomorrow. The Cheesecake Factory Locations in Kansas City The way it melts for a hamburger - there is nothing better. His creation, SubTropolis, is the largest of the underground facilities with nearly 6 million square feet of industrial space for lease. MALONE: Yes. SubTropolis - Wikipedia Kenny Malone is a correspondent for NPR's Planet Moneypodcast. It's going up because the government MALONE: And do you - you hear of it. ASCHEBROCK: But then we had the issue with storing the stuff. Uncover the finest, most undercover experiences in Kansas City. But every instinct I had said, oh, this - I'm not so sure this is going to work out so well. SubTropolis | Snopes.com However, when Prohibition was enacted in 1919 via the 18th Amendment, the alcohol purveyor shut its doors. Here's a few you should know, A guide to discovering Kansas City's public art installations. MALONE: One part of the solution then was to gently get that milk supply down. 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. These are the 13 weirdest places you can possibly go in Missouri. Visit a sweet shop selling one of the first candies ever made and sold in America. And do you, like, smack your forehead? Which makes for a thriving underground business community, as unnerving as a giant hole in the side of a bluff may be. That is, until last month. And he says the government could not just release a flood of surplus cheese onto the market because it would crush cheese producers. Thanks for listening. SubTropolis is a 55,000,000-square-foot (5,100,000m2), 1,100-acre (4.5km2) 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. About 3.2 acres of available space are added each year as active mining continues. Cheeseproclub.com. 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. MALONE: Bob Aschebrock was one of the government's cheese graders. DUFFIN: Nevertheless, when Carter got elected, he goes all in. 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. As the room and pillar mining method is used to extract limestone throughout the Midwest, many companies are looking at ways to utilize the hundreds of millions of square feet created in this manner for everything from mushroom farming to crude oil stockpiling. Like us on Facebook to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. Who knows? There is currently about $85 million earmarked to buy dairy and distribute it to places like schools and food banks. The air is cool and the barroom massive almost cathedral-like. In 1949, the Agricultural Act allowed a government agency to buy up dairy products to stabilize prices. MALONE: The government is creating a price floor. 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. 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. WTF Happened to Government Cheese? - Vice Andy Novakovic spent his summers as a kid working on his grandparents' dairy farm in Wisconsin. Thank you! DUFFIN: It's one thing for politicians to say, we want the price of milk to go up. Very, very expensive cheese. [3] The National Archives and Records Administration also leases space for a Federal Records Center. Atchison Storage Facility - Wikipedia He says the government was buying powdered milk, butter and cheddar cheese - only grade-A cheddar, though. But that does not mean the government had fixed the problem. We walk inside. MALONE: But this is America. The young people do - they say, well, I can't go out with a girl or I can't go out with a guy because I'm on the road all the time. Born from tragedy, the remote national park is bringing tourism and other changes. MALONE: The government cheese caves started to empty out. Kansas City caves hold immigration records underground | The Kansas MALONE: Dan says that the cheese took up about half an acre of space. And welcome to PLANET MONEY. Government Cheese Stored In Caves - Blogger Make sure to come up for fresh air, as well as bangers and mash. Either one should get you a higher price. Before that, he was a reporter for Miami's WLRN. DUFFIN: But that does not work for milk because milk starts going bad the minute it comes out of the cow. Many tenants at . Cave - Minecraft Wiki Oh, boy - here we go. Kansas City underground: How to explore the hidden locations - KCUR 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. Missouri's caves can . All our area around here - everybody had cheese. MALONE: Now, to be fair, that's probably not enough to start filling caves again. Food Caves in Missouri SubTropolis, Kansas City. It is estimated that Kansas has more than 700 and caves, and almost 350 are in the Red Hills. The cheesy story all started in 1949, when the Agricultural Act of 1949 gave the Commodity Credit Corporation, a government-owned corporation dedicated to stabilizing farm incomes, the authority. Like SubTropolis, the strangely sterile space is separated by humungous numbered pillars. MALONE: So instead, the cheddar cheese was processed - that helps it keep longer - and then it was repackaged in two and five-pound, like, bricks. DIRECTIONS: Dissolve the yeast in the hot water and let stand until foamy, about ten minutes. USCIS opened its National Records Center in a cave in Lee's Summit, Missouri, in 1999. Westons downtown district was established in 1837, so theres a lot of history here. SubTropolis is used by around 50 businesses and organizations, for a variety of purposes. Oh, yeah. But there is a chance that the government may be in the business of government cheese again. (Shouting) Government cheese. ASCHEBROCK: There is a bung - what they call a bunghole up on the top. Cheese-makers buy more milk. And they're like, we need more cheese graders. Well, its called SubTropolis, is owned by Hunt Midwest yes, the same Hunt family that owns the Kansas City Chiefs and is wide enough to hold 42 Arrowhead Stadiums. Theres even a train track winding through the colossal complex, and many, many exit signs. Youll have to climb down to get to it, led mysteriously by a sequence of ramps and labyrinthine walkways. The Trump administration says today it will make an estimated $12 billion in government assistance available. One of Kansas City's best-loved parks is home to a secret cave No one knows why the cave in Roanoke Park was walled offor why, after decades, it opened last month. Do you or does someone you know work at SubTropolis? While the popular cheese has changed a lot since then, from access limited to royalty in 1625 to the confinement of "government cheddar" during World War II, the caves are constant . I get in my car in my garage at home and drive underground here, so its all temperature controlled. MALONE: Again, our dairy economist Andy Novakovic. Blackwell Motors showcases a variety of fiberglass animals, and people come from all around just to see them. We've got 60 million of these that the government owns with mold. These days, units are available for business leasing or to store items that would benefit from the particular climate control found underground. 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. Although other facilities like SubTropolis exist, there are none on the same such scale. 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. What are the most unusual places in Missouri? DUFFIN: This is why there is also a community of people who are still obsessed with government cheese - Internet chat boards trying to find something comparable, restaurants claiming they have a recipe for it. And they go to their bosses. But I am in favor of giving farmers an equal break. Onandaga Cave is one of the most gorgeous underground places in Missouri. Last year, the U.S. produced nearly 12 billion pounds of cheese -- an all-time high, according to the USDA. MALONE: Who's got time for dating when you're traveling around eating cheese everywhere? UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: That's government cheese. I can tell you what we had to reject it for - flat, bitter, yeasty, malty, old milk, fruity MALONE: That sounds lovely. ASCHEBROCK: Will eat any cheese. 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. Weve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible, a USDA official was quoted as saying. MALONE: So if you wanted to sell cheese to the government, Bob would show up with this, like, hollow rod called a cheese trier. MALONE: As the government bought more and more cheese, sure, the price of milk went up. MALONE: Today's episode was produced by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Nick Fountain and Rhaina Cohen. Decades of propping up the dairy industryby buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheesehad backfired, hard. 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. Copyright 2018 NPR. At the time, the distillery offered over a hundred products, which were distributed by mail order across the country. We depend on ad revenue to craft and curate stories about the worlds hidden wonders. 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. If you havent spent a day wandering the streets of Weston, Missouri, youre missing out. So the government gave a bunch to schools, then to the Army. Sign up for our email, delivered twice a week. Government Cheese: Well-Intentioned Program Goes Off The Rails Starting in 1995, a government nonprofit has promoted a pro-dairy policy - in direct opposition to the Department of Agriculture and government nutritionists. DUFFIN: Like, hey, people of America, wouldn't you like to drink more milk? DUFFIN: Government cheese starts to show up in all kinds of popular culture. Posted on June 8, 2022 ; in pete davidson first snl episode; by Since that requires capital, the dairy industry starts consolidating, says Andrea Wiley, author of Re-Imagining Milk. How do we - how do we get this cat out of the tree? The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. What Will the U.S. Government Do With 1.4 Billion Pounds of Cheese? Offer available only in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico). It certainly was on the edge of that. Yeah. Buoyed by items like Wendys dual Double Melt sandwich concept and Taco Bells steak quesadilla, the organization helped boost cheese sales by more than 30 million pounds. What is government cheese? Why does the U.S. government have 1.4 ASCHEBROCK: Well, I think cheese eating is better than dating sometimes. Springfield Underground, an Erlen Group Company is a commercial industrial park with the advantage of underground storage. Missouri has more than 7,000 caves under its ground, though fewer than 20 are easily accessible to most people. MALONE: Yeah. 7 Awe-Inspiring Drone Views That Will Show Off Kansas Like Never Before, Theres An Incredible Meteor Shower Happening This Summer And Kansas Has A Front Row Seat, The Underrated Natural Wonder Every Kansan Should See At Least Once, The Breathtaking Overlook In Kansas That Lets You See For Miles And Miles, 8 Roads With The Best Windshield Views In All Of Kansas, Theres A Geological Wonder That Youd Never Expect To Find In Kansas, The Beautiful Spot In Kansas Where You Can See Into Three Other States At Once, 9 Amazing Natural Wonders Hiding In Plain Sight In Kansas No Hiking Required, this cool hiking trail that has another cave. G. DEP: (Rapping) Can't buy trees with government cheese.