Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/08/the-usda-has-1-5-billion-pounds-of-cheese-stashed-in-caves-in-missouri.html
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I think the obvious difficulty here is that raising that much cheese to a stable orbit using chemical rockets will probably cause liquefaction of the playload and turn that cheese into a sloppy mess. Freezing it to offset liquifaction could cause it to crumble. The new satellite would only be useful for pizza toppings at best. Should it de-orbit the moon could hit your eye like a big pizza pie.
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I think Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction story about this.
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I also think that this cheese could be turned into solid rocket fuel with minimal alterations. Just a handful of additives, really.
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Paging Peter Bazooka!
The congressman was in taxi number 23
And I was in cab 17
But numbers are meaningless
In this kind of cat and squid gameMy driver was an Aries
And he laughed when I said, “Follow that cab”
And he kept laughing
Until he saw the cold blue steel of Little Elvis“Keep your god-damn hands off that radio”, I warned him
“I work for the government”
This is actually a half truth
I’m really a bike courierBut I make a lot of deliveries
To government offices
That’s where I heard about the cheese
And the colored voices in my head kept singingAll I gotta do is put my ear to the wall
And I can hear it all, yes, I can hear it all
All I gotta do is put my ear to the wall
And I can even hear the little insects crawlThere’s this super secret government program called
“Operation the cheese stands alone”
It’s the congressmen’s pet project
They claim that they’re giving surplus cheese to the needyI, of course, have my suspicions
After 15 very quiet minutes
The congressman’s cab pulled up outside a warehouse
I had the Aries circle around the building and drop me offHe seemed to be grasping the importance of my mission
Since he said I didn’t have to pay him
As long as I promised to stay very far away from him and his taxi
I swear, some people just don’t want to get involvedAll I gotta do is put my ear to the wall
And I can hear it all, yes, I can hear it all
All I gotta do is put my ear to the wall
And I can even hear the little insects crawlSo I walked into that cold dark place
Little Elvis drawn and ready for action
I too was ready, ready for the moment
When I would be a real American
- Peter Bazooka, The Dead Milkmen
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With US Big Cow locked into over-production, they keep looking for ways to get rid of it, but there’s only so much cheese they can stuff into a pizza. International sales are always tempting, but other countries don’t want to have their own dairy industries destroyed, especially if they have incompatible price-production controls like Canada.
Turning it into baby formula is a good way to ship it out, and never mind if that’s actually healthy or makes economic sense in other countries. The milk must flow!
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Austin McConnell covered this as well:
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It sounds like something which would have shown up on Z-Nation (Which was basically The Walking Dead with jokes). It featured an eternally rolling World’s Largest Cheese Wheel crushing zombies in its path
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Now I know where to go after the nuclear apocalypse.
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Don’t forget the Lactaid!
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As a KC resident… yeah, the amount of cave storage in this area is ridiculous.
The whole area is an awful lot of bedrock limestone, and a almost all of these “caves” are actually limestone mines. SubTropolis is the biggest one, but there are several more in the metro. Miles and miles of this, including USPS storage of rare stamps, several film distributors storing rare original reels of classic films, and what I think is the largest undergrounds office space.
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I might know the specific cave storage they are talking about. There is a system that even has an indoor paintball park on on end!
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Having had government cheese for many years, its more of a “cheese”. Like a really bad Velveeta. So when people imagine rows of fancy wheeled cheese, I image a much more mundane rows of long white or brown boxes of cheese.
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This is the stuff to squirrel away for your post apocalypse story line. Setting up your camp in a cave system used for storage of goods with tons of food in an easily defensible (against zombies, at least) position.
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Anyone have directions to the secret craft beer cave? Text me!
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A surprising number of songs reference government cheese.
(Avoid the right-libertarian song of the same name by The Rainmakers 
)
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