WHAT LIES BENEATH

INSIDE MISSOURI’S INFAMOUS CHEESE CAVES.

BY BRITTANY CHAFFEE

ILLUSTRATION BY FRANK MOTH

DEEP WITHIN THE HEART OF THE OZARKS SETTLED UNDER Springfield, Missouri, is an old urban legend: caves filled with cheese. As the story goes, back in the eighties, the subterranean spot housed enough surplus cheese — some 1.4 billion pounds — to wrap around the U.S. Capitol. That heyday fizzled out in the nineties, when the federal government got rid of it. But like any good folklore, the mystique lives on. The mere existence of cheese caves sounds like the plot of a, well, cheesy sci-fi flick. One that begs a lot of questions: How did this all start? Where did the cheese come from? Where did it go? And what’s stored in those and the final home of the Ark of the Covenant.” By 1981, the government had a treasure trove of aging cheese — and no idea what to do with it. A USDA official even told the Washington Post that “probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.” cheese tasted like shame,” Lucas adds. “They couldn’t provide for their families. For them, there were no happy memories about it.” A clear theme surfaced: The cheese was more than just cheese, representing both hardship and resilience. But even Reagan’s TEFAP program didn’t deplete the stockpile. So in the nineties, the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board created Dairy Management Inc. to empty the caves once and for all. Its prerogative? Squeeze as much milk, cheese and yogurt into big-name brands as possible. Bloomberg went as far as calling DMI the “Illuminati of cheese,” describing it as “a secretive, government-sponsored entity putting cheese anywhere it can stuff it.”

But President Ronald Reagan had a better idea. Spurred on by public criticism, in December 1981 he announced his plan to give it away. He debuted the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program, which ultimately distributed some 30 million pounds of cheese to elderly and low-income individuals.

Essentially, the USDA decides what food will be sent to hungerrelief organizations like Feeding America, then it gets delivered to their warehouses for distribution — no caves necessary. And yet the rumors persist. “Folks are still trying to sensationalize these numbers by suggesting that the cheese stockpile is still bigger than the Capitol building,” says Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Now, the caves are primarily used for cold storage for all kinds of products, not just dairy.”

NOR-SON OUTFITS A RUSTIC LAKE ESTATE WITH OVERSIZE STONE AND TOASTED TIMBER ON A GRAND SCALE.

BY JENNIFER BLAISE KRAMER