June 23, 2021 • 62 mins
It's no secret that Americans love cheese. It's everywhere -- in fact, some restaurants specialize entirely in cheese products, like mac and cheese or grilled cheese sandwiches. Over the past few decades, cheese consumption has consistently risen, and as of 2019 the average person in the US ate over 40 pounds of cheese per year. So what led to this? The answer, oddly enough, is a genuine conspiracy. Tune in to learn more about the real-life Big Cheese.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nol.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul Mission Controlled deconds. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. This is a follow up
from an earlier Listener Male segment where our fellow conspiracy
(00:47):
realist Ryan hipped us to a strange story about cheese
in the United States. We talked a little bit about
our favorite cheese commercials. I mean, some of that is
clearly a genre now. You know, it's sometimes called although
I hate the name food porn. Uh, we all know
what we're talking about. The slow motion clips of like
(01:09):
um no, you had a good example of a mozzarella
stick that's a classic being pulled. And then we had
you know, Taco bell Que, Sadilla's Casa Lupas, which play
a big role here and uh, this this kind of
commercial is almost a troupe nowadays. And in fact, there
are trendy restaurants of plenty in this country dedicated entirely
(01:31):
to one sort of cheesy food or another. Like, have
you guys ever been to a macaroni and cheese restaurant
or a place that only sells grilled cheese sandwiches. It's
very New York. Yeah, there's a place I went to.
I think it was in Oakland. It was called Homework
or something like that. I was meant to evoke feelings
of like childhood and like lunch room stuff, but it
(01:51):
was these bespoke kind of personal pan like little um,
you know, those dishes that are meant to be put
in the oven, kind of like bakeware or whatever, like
little Dutch oven kind of guys, with baccaroni and cheese
of all different flavors and varieties. And it was obviously
very overpriced for mac and cheese, but it was delicious. Um.
What about fawn Do you guys have been to a
(02:11):
fawn do restaurant? There's a chain here in Atlanta. I
think it's called the Melting Pot or something like that.
For me, it was all about the pirate ship. Oh,
Dante is down the hatch. You're Dante's guy, Yeah it
was so good. Uh yeah, we yea grilled cheese food trucks.
(02:34):
Do not sleep on those in Atlanta. There are a
ton of them, uh, grilled cheese food trucks. Guys. Oh
so we're we're both cheesy and fans of cheese. So
if you do not like this is the weirdest trigger
warning we've ever done. If you do not like puns,
this is not the episode for you, and you should
(02:54):
just go to the next episode. But but the thing is,
you know, a long time listens, you know, I have
a personal obsession with Casa Dilla's. They're basic, They're kind
of a grilled cheese, I would argue. Um. And in fact, folks,
all of us here at this stuff, they don't want
you to know. Team we all love cheese and we
all love talking about food, and we wanted to make
(03:16):
sure that was an accurate statement. So right before we
went to air, I went ahead and pained our super
producer code named Doc Holiday, and said, Matt and I
worked on how to write this question. Said, hey, Doc,
this is a work question. Do you like cheese? If so,
what kind? Doc says, I love cheese, but I don't
(03:37):
eat it as much as I would. And she kind
of alluded to, you know, health concerns, but she says,
I am literally the eating shredded cheese out of the
bag person. So we're gonna hit her with same we're
reading this on air, sorry, doc So. And you know
Paul michion Control look Horse, one of the one of
(03:57):
the prime uh champ beans of apple Bees loves cheese.
Matt Old, do you guys have a favorite cheese or
or you are? Yes? Old cheese kind of kind of
crewe Yeah, I mean, I guess all cheeses aren't really
created equal. I'll tell you what I think does get
slept on a little bit is just good old fashioned
American cheese product, you know, not even properly. It's like
(04:18):
I wouldn't like I like it on I'll tell you
what I like it on melted, because it melts beautifully
on like breakfast biscuit, like an egg and a sausage
on a biscuit, and you to slap that cheese product on.
We're gonna get into this um and it just melts
beautifully and it's its own thing and a lot of
like kind of cool breakfast divy type joints do that too.
(04:38):
But I am I like a I like a funky cheese,
you know, like a little bit of a foot smell
to cheese. Well, I don't like you ever had a raclette.
Raclette as a one. It's like a Swiss one that
also has its own kind of fondue situation where you
melted over meats and stuff on this special little grill
(05:00):
that's and you drink a lot of vodka with it,
which is a bonus. Man, that sounds good for my money, Yeah,
for my money. It's you combine let's say, a pecan
slash pecan with some kind of dried fruit and a
goat cheese. Mix those together with anything else. You're good
to go. Oh yeah, baby, yeah right. I'm I'm pretty
(05:24):
uh as you guys know, I am pretty non discriminatory
when it comes to food in general. Uh. Doc says
that her favorites are gorgonzola, blue cheese, and gouda. Uh
And when we were talking about this, you probably have
your own favorite cheese, conspiracy realist, just statistically, but we're
(05:46):
talking about this, we're talking about a national phenomenon. Cheese
is almost a staple. Lights. Cheese is a staple nowadays
in the US, and it can be weird if you
travel to other countries where cheese is not really a thing. Uh.
And you know you wouldn't see it very often in
a in your normal grocery store or market. You probably
(06:08):
only run into it if you went to like up
pizza restaurant or something of that nature. But in different
parts of the world that are historically not on board
with cheese, uh, it is still like a growing industry.
So here are the facts. Before we get into the conspiracy. Folks,
you have to realize cheese is, as the younger humans
(06:32):
would say, popular a f in the US unless you
are lactose intolerant, unless you're vegan or have some other
dietary restriction. Odds are you have consumed some cheese recently.
This wasn't always the case. We'll get to it. Um.
We are adventurous cheese eaters. But if you're the average American,
(06:54):
you know one of your favorite cheeses, or the one
you consume most often, is gonna be cheddar. And there
are health concerns that come into cheese consumption. But I
suggest we put those two as to the side for
a moment. Uh, to the side of our cheese plate,
and look at just the straight consumption, because this is
(07:15):
for cheesemakers. Uh, this sounds like a resounding success story.
So if you start back in the mid nineteen seventies,
let's say nineteen seventy five, you're an average American. Look
at you, so are we. We are all average Americans.
We consumed around fourteen pounds of cheese. That's in a year.
(07:36):
So in a year's time, you would eat fourteen pounds
of cheese. Now, if you went to a deli right now,
wherever you are, and you said, give me a pound
of cheese, that seems like a lot right now, those
it does. I think you typically order your cheese and
maybe a quarter pounds, right. I think a quarter pound
(07:56):
of cheese is respectable. And if you've got a family,
it's half a pound or pound. That's just the way
you gotta go. I am a family, family of one.
Look that's my this is my experience. So perhaps I'm wrong,
but you know, just imagine fourteen pounds. That seems like
(08:17):
a lot already. It in my opinion, maybe that's wrong,
but it's not. It's not as much as it has
grown to. Yeah, you're right, Matt, it's skyrocketed as of
nineteen and this is a number that continued to rise
during the pandemic. But as of the average US consumer
was eating around forty four zero point four pounds of
(08:41):
cheese per year. Yeah, yeah, and uh that's just the
tip of the cheeseburg or we're keeping it. For the
past ten years, US per capita consumption of cheese has
risen even more, uh over five pounds um from that point.
(09:03):
And as this began to happen, we had other dairy
categories that had largely remained unchanged or were flat or
had even fallen UM. Things like consumption of fluid milk
had plummeted from two forty seven pounds per person in
the N two hundred and forty six pounds, Which makes sense.
I mean, like we've talked about, I think on the
(09:25):
the cheese segment on the listener mail. You know, there
were all these amazing ad campaigns, you know, to get
milk back up milk drinking about how it's good for
your bones and calcium and and got milk and all
of that. Uh. Now, I think most people think of
milk as an ingredient rather than a beverage. Unto itself
like something you add to a smoothie or using making
a cake. But it doesn't seem very in vogue to
(09:48):
just drink milk as a refreshing beverage, unless unless you're
a kid. Uh, you know, a lot of parents still
give their children milk. Like in the waters, I give
my son milk cow's milk, um and we have, we
have for a long time. But the the ability to
this always so interesting. The ability to digest lactose in
(10:11):
adulthood is a relatively recent mutation in part of the
human species, and it's far from uniform. Uh. So sometimes
it's funny because if you if you watch television or film, uh,
you'll see the consumption of drinking milk is almost always
a statement. Now it's not the only time you'd see
(10:33):
it as like a quote unquote normal everyday thing. Is
if it's an indicator of time and place, so like
our story takes place in the nineteen fifties or something,
or if it's one of those tremendously irritating breakfast scenes
where there's this huge you know that, like there's this
huge spread and they got juice and they got water,
(10:53):
and they got coffee and they got milk, and then
the guy, like the patriarch or the kid there or
whomever's running through the house and they're they're like getting
calls and they look at this and they like take
half a bite of toast, and they're like, all right,
love you, honey, gotta go, And no one mentions you monster.
I did all this work. I made you this continental
(11:14):
breakfast type situation. You didn't need all that, but I
did it for you because I love you. You couldn't
even bother yourself to eat more than a bite of toast.
I want a divorce. That's that's where that goes. But no,
it's true. Milk is not nearly as popular as it
used to be. I like chocolate milk. I think that's
still probably flies off the shells pretty well, but it's
(11:36):
something you put in your coffee. Now. I think I
got a sideways story for you guys, real quick about
you know, the urban legend or the rumor about chocolate milk, right,
the bad milk. Yeah, that it's the milk with the
clots in it, with the blood clots, chocolate everything. For me, well,
back in the back in the day, that may have
(11:57):
been more true than it is today. You're probably safe
thanks to federal health standards, So please enjoy your chocolate milk. Also,
try you who if you haven't yet. It's a good
it's a good you who is to chocolate milk? What
those cheese slices are to cheese? You? Who is a
chocolate drink product? Right? There's any real milk or chocolate
(12:19):
in that beverage like a powder. But but yeah, we're
we're inundated with cheese in the US. It's officially a
cheesy country and a cheesy people. How did we get here? Well,
there are some easy, kind of fun answers. First, the
popularity of cheese owes a ton to the rise of pizza,
(12:41):
and I, for one, I'm grateful for the rise of pizza.
I know it's maybe not the same as the legit
pizza con I know it's absolutely not the same as
legit pizza created in Italy. But because of pizza alone,
mozzarella went from being kind of this obscure thing you'd
see it a fancy cheese place to one of the
most popular varieties of cheese in the country. Like around
(13:05):
like cheddar status, which is Cheddar is like the Kanye
West of cheese In the state. And was that an
accidental pun the rise of pizza? No, wait, yes, yes
it was. I didn't think about just checking that, checking
one of those off the list. If anyone wants to
make a drinking game out of this, yes, we all
are not accidental or not. We have a list of uh,
I think we all have. We've got a mental list
(13:27):
of puns. So again, this is gonna be pun heavy.
We've done some pretty serious, kind of dark episodes that
were we think very important, so we wanted to take
We're recorded on a Friday, folks. We wanted to do
something that was not immensely depressing. So well, you're right.
Just to get to the concept that cheese owes pizza
(13:48):
a lot of gratitude, at least as an industry, as
a food thing. Uh, really think about think about the
local pizza chain that maybe you grew up with. Then
also think about the big ones, the Dominoes, the pizza
huts eventually the Papa John's and the Goodfellas and the
ccs and all these other ones. When when you all
(14:10):
of a sudden, you had companies that could just deliver
you food, which wasn't a big thing in a lot
of places, and for a lot of companies, delivering food
was not a big thing, but it kind of changed
the game and how Americans got food and the other thing.
Just to really remember here, these aren't Italian companies bringing
(14:32):
you know, Italian pizza that's done correctly in the Italian way.
These are American companies that are creating food products with
relatively cheap ingredients where they can make a ton of
money on Uh So it's just a it's a very
different it's a very different thing. Um, we don't have
to get all into pizza that. We can leave that
(14:53):
to the saver folks, but uh yeah, definitely shout out
what it's telling we see all the time. Right, it's
like bastardization and sort of like um, I don't know,
co opting of like culture and turning it into this
sort of like product that can be mass marketed. And
I think, uh, these chain pizza restaurants are exactly that.
(15:14):
Because you go to like a Antiko's really awesome pizza
joint here in Atlanta, are anywhere you know that your
name your pizza joint of choice that is like a
little more traditional, you know, it's not covered in shredded cheese.
It has like a slice of like buffalo mozzarella, like
a little circle doll up on the top, and that's
what you get. And it's delicious and it's very delicate
(15:36):
and light h and it's not you don't get that
massive cheese pull. You get like one. But you know again,
they've got bags and bags and pounds and thousands and
thousands of tons of this stuff that they're trying to ship,
they're trying to sell, and it's like, uh, it is
a conspiracy between big pizza and big cheese. Well, let's
let's step back a second before we use the C word. So,
uh well, let's keep painting the picture, right. Did did
(16:00):
someone who went on the found Dominoes and Pizza Hut
go to Italy and say, look at this anything you
can do, I can do feeda or was this just
a natural outgrowth of changing trends and taste in the
American public? Did it happen as marketers would put it, organically?
(16:20):
We know that part of the that We know that
pizza has also given a lot of heft to shredded cheese,
in particular, about six billion dollars of the natural cheese
categories shredded cheese and uh, this the natural cheese category. Overall,
(16:42):
there is a little less than eighteen billion. We're talking
a lot of money here. During the coronavirus pandemic, Kraft Hinds,
which is a giant in the food industry, said it
saw an unprecedented double digit growth in this sale of
those craft singles, which is in the rest of the
world people would probably call that American cheese. It's those
(17:04):
processed yellow cheese slices we're talking about. But pizza and
a pandemic and organic taste cannot entirely explain America's weird
relationship with cheese. When we look into the dawn of
the American Age of cheesiness, we were surprised to find
(17:24):
there is literally a conspiracy of foot not a conspiracy theory,
not something that happened in the past. It is going
odd today. As as we pointed out, there really is
a thing called big cheese. And they're after you. What
are we talking about. We'll tell you after a word
from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. So we've
(17:53):
all heard of government cheese, right, We'll get to that.
And if you, if you were in eighties or nineties, kid,
you would doubtlessly heard of this stuff, even if you
never saw it in person. But when we're talking about cheese,
really talking about milk, right, because you can't have cheat, well,
(18:14):
you can't have good cheese without milk, that's right. So
let's that's that's wind the clock back to the good
old nineteen eighties, the late eighties on the cusp of
the nineties, that that gray period where it sort of
still feels like the one era, but things are starting
to change a little bit. Night seven the mediaan dairy
farm had eighty cows or fewer. Uh. Today that number
(18:34):
is closer to nine hundred. So economies of scale drive
costs down and bolster output. Right. So on top of that,
you've got the average cow producing more milk than ever before,
and that is because of better breeding practices. They've kind
of figured it out and honed it down to a
science to get the most output for their buck. Uh.
(18:55):
And there are also those like heinous machines that you've
seen in like some of the factory production of milk.
I like the phrase heinous machines. That sounds like a
good album named I agree, but I think we all
know we're talking about those kind of like dystopian sci
fi milk suction cup tube machines that we're talking about, Matt. Yeah,
(19:16):
and some of them are completely fine. I mean, well,
who's who's to say people would argue that fact, but um,
many are less impactful on the cows than others. U
some I would use the term heinus. So yeah, anyway,
at the very least, it doesn't seem pleasant for the animal, right, Yeah, absolutely,
(19:37):
But as we know in our previous work on livestock conspiracies,
the feeling of the animal being used doesn't often come
into play. And there's also we should also, by the way,
folks do a an episode in the future on chicken farms,
just chicken, chicken, the chicken industry, poultry industry in particular.
(19:58):
It's bad, bad, I learn some weird stuff. But wait,
this is our light episode. We're keeping it light. Sorry, sorry, guys,
We're back to it. So you know what it is,
even at the cost I mean, and it's hard to
even talk about, but at the cost of the experience
of the cow. The whole point of all of that production,
(20:21):
it's to get more food for humans that need food.
In theory. In theory, yes, because it's responding to a market. Right,
there's a need for this milk, so we must produce
more of it. How do we do that more efficiently? Well,
this is how So I just put that out there.
Yeah there is a logic, Yeah, there is a logic.
(20:42):
The farmers weren't sitting around saying, how can we make
things worse? People don't usually think that way. And you know, often,
especially in smaller farms, they have a very human connection
with their livestock, you know, and they and they want
they want these cow us to live good lives and
be happy. Because if the cow is in a good
(21:04):
mental state, because it is a higher order mammal, if
it's in a good mental state, then that's going to
affect its diet, it's nutrition, and therefore the milk it produces.
We have to acknowledge at this point the dairy industry,
and we're talking about uh, several years or decades so ago,
they were not just producing milk for a domestic consumer,
(21:27):
they were producing it for other countries. And then a
crash hit China's economy slowed down. This drove the global
demand from milk down. At the same time, the EU
said they had had these domestic caps on how much
milk a European or EU farmer could produce, and they
remove those caps, so all of a sudden, the EU
(21:50):
is making a bunch of milk, which means they need
less from the US. Russia slapped sanctions on foeign cheese
because they were mad about some Western sanctions, and then
the US dollar was stronger, and that meant that American
dairy farmers had to sell milk at a more expensive
rate internationally. And these factors combined into this like bubbly
(22:12):
caso dip of problems. There was a massive ongoing cheese glut.
There was not a tortilla chip of a solution. Insight,
This did not occur in a vacuum at all historically,
because if you look back, you'll see that the US
government has a very long history of supporting dairy farmers
when prices collapse, through through subsidies, through marketing campaigns, through
(22:39):
government cheese. Uh, maybe we we should talk a little
bit about government cheese, I think before we continue, what
do you guys say? I think we should because I,
for the longest time sort of thought it was a joke,
um that it was sort of a euphemism for, you know,
welfare in some way. But it turns out it's a
real thing. It's an actual cheese product that the government
(23:01):
would distribute to low income individuals UH and families UM
in place of money or as a supplement to their
you know nutrition. Right. Yeah, it's processed cheese. It's been
around since the World Wars. It was used in military
consitions during World War Two. It's been in schools since
(23:21):
the nineteen fifties. So if you went to a public
school in the US, you probably at some point did
eat government cheese. It got a it became politically charged
because it was associated with welfare beneficiaries, people who received
food stamps or SNAP, people who are elderly and got
Social Security checks, and then people who visited food banks.
(23:44):
But there's absolutely nothing shameful about that. And and you know,
odds are outside of schools. We've got plenty of people
in our audience today who have at some point been
on government assistance. And not to a box too much,
but yeah, you should not feel bad about it. That
is what that assistance is there for. Every time you
(24:06):
buy something and Uncle Sam takes a little it takes
a little vig from you at the cash register. It's
supposed to go back to you in some way. Yeah,
I'm not gonna lie. I was myself when I was
a young new parent, um, you know, kind of getting
started in my career. Even before really I was there
was a period where we were living with my my
(24:26):
mom um when my daughter was born, and we got
a little bit of government assistance for a brief period
of time when we lived in Athens, Georgia. It was
actually kind of great because they had a system where
you could use those SNAP benefits to shop at the
local farmers market and you would get to to one
um value for your Snap dollars. So that was actually
(24:48):
a really progressive, great way of doing it, I thought,
And it would also support local farmers and that's that's
part of that's part of what this uh, that's part
of the good intention behind programs like this. The cheese, though,
where did all this government cheese come from? That's the question.
(25:09):
That's where we we see some wrinkles in the story
because it really was the motivation to get people who
needed food more food, or was there something else behind
that move? Exactly, Matt, Exactly. So the cheese often came
from food surpluses that were stockpiled by the government as
(25:31):
part of these this huge subsidies system. Butter was also
stockpiled and then it was given under the same program.
But you don't hear a lot of people talking about
government butter doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't sound as good exactly.
So while this program it's not nefarious, it also isn't
fully altruistic. Uncle Sam is killing two birds with one
(25:54):
wheel of parmesan. Here. Yes, they are feeding the hungry,
but they're also supporting a massive, sometimes faltering dairy industry
by guaranteeing farmers will be able to sell their products
even if the actual demand does not exist. This is
exactly what Matt was talking about earlier when we kept
(26:16):
saying in theory to each other, because in theory is
not the same thing as in practice. Gentlemen, it is
time for us to share with our fellow conspiracy realists
the story of the Illuminati of cheese, which is a
real thing. Like, can we say that one more time
and Paul maybe give us a like a whatever is
a cheesy, sinister sound effect, the Illuminati of cheese perfect.
(26:46):
I thought you meant literal cheese sound effect, but well,
we'll see what Paul comes up with magic Man, what
are you talking about? We already know where Yeah, we
we paused the recording and brainstormed about this for twenty minutes. Right. So,
as we said, American consumption of cheese has skyrocketed. But
(27:10):
even that skyrocketing consumption, which was not organic, by the way,
has not been enough to meet demand because we are
grappling with a system that has been in place since
the nineteen thirties, since the Great Depression, when the federal
government bailed out America's dairy industry with all these subsidies,
(27:31):
and many people who are not in in the dairy
industry themselves are not aware of this, but those subsidies
are in effect today, and part of the knock on
consequence of this is that Uncle Sam is underwritten this
gigantic surplus of milk in the dairy industry that far
(27:53):
far exceeds the appetites of Americans like we even even
the cheesiest cheese lover in this country, like the number
one cheese eater person. Uh, if everybody was like that person,
we still would not be able to buy all the
(28:14):
milk and all the cheese that was being produced. And
when when the US government realized that there was this
huge surplus. They found themselves in a difficult political situation. Uh,
they knew that it would be and it's something we
talked about and passed off air. But you know, during
(28:37):
this time, post World War two, things like that. Uh,
they knew that they had two choices. They could remove
the subsidies, which would lead to over time a reduction
and the surplus of production, or they could find a
way to buy this to create a market that did
not exist at this level. And rural vote, the farmer vote,
(29:03):
was very, very important. So so imagine you're you're, you know,
a presidential administration. Are you going to go to these
people who voted for you and then pull the financial
rug out from under them? Yes? And I want to
give you a quick quote from a professor of agricultural
economics at Cornell University. This quote comes from a video
created by CNBC. You can check it out on YouTube,
(29:25):
I believe right now, maybe on CNBC, But this quote
is dealing with exactly that Ben. He says that at
this time in the nineteen thirties, when these subsidies first arrive, quote,
rural America presented over half of the population of Americans
and farmers presented over half of rural America. So there
(29:46):
was this sense that as a politician, as the government,
if you are helping out farmers, you are helping out
a lot of citizens slash, as you said, been voters. Yeah,
that's the thing that's and this happens a lot in
the kind of political system that the US has, Right,
you have, Uh sometimes they're vilified as being special interests, right,
(30:10):
but you have these voters and these businesses or these
institutions who have a very specific set of things they
want to see in place. And at times these forces
can be relatively a political you know, the name brand
of the political party doesn't matter as much as their actions.
(30:32):
So you know, if there's a third party called them
provolone rangers, Uh, it just gets worse, It gets worse.
Did Uh If if you have that, you know, this
other party and there their policies are, you know, not
too extreme, but one of their big things is they
(30:53):
support a subsidy that supports your industry, then you're probably
going to vote for them, you know what I mean,
or at least donate to their cause. So that's what happened. Uh,
the US made the decision to and you know, I
think a lot of historians agree it was the right
decision to enact these subsidies for the dairy industry and
other parts of US business during the Great Depression. But
(31:16):
once you open that door, it can be political suicide
to close it, to step it back, And so they continued,
they continued subsidizing this industry. And now in recent years,
the US dairy surplus has reached a record high, and
it's it's been going this way for a while. Uh.
(31:37):
The U s d A quickly realized as a result
of these subsidies, they they could not figure out what
to do with all the milk, and so the band
aid solution was, I don't know, make it cheese last
longer than milk, and that's what they did. And so
in recent years, we have, as we mentioned our listener
(31:57):
mail segment, UH with Ryan, we have as a country
generated a surplus of one point for billion with a
b pounds of cheese. And you'll see all these breathless
reports like go on YouTube and just google cheese surplus.
Colbert's got a great spot on it. Your you know,
(32:18):
your local news might have done a story on it
a few years ago. But you'll see these these breathless
comparisons because we as Americans love weird measurements. One of
the ones who found was one point four billion pounds
of cheese. That's enough to wrap around the US capital. Uh.
Nobody's saying we should consume it all. Luckily you can
(32:40):
store cheese. But even if the nation tried to eat
all of this cheese, it's less and less likely that
we could do it because that surplus is still building
despite the fact that people are consuming more cheese. Uh,
there were side effects that uh would break havoc on
(33:03):
all of us. No, it's to say that's the thing though.
It's like not not to get soapbox or anything, but
like you know, with the healthcare crisis that we have
in this country, and then you start to see that
all of this consumer culture that leads to poor health
uh and and and that this lack of preventative medicine
everything's about curing when you're already like super sick and
(33:25):
on your lound death's door. A lot of it is
like literally the fault of the government in the first place.
This whole cheese glut thing. When you really start to
drill down into it, right like like I mean, I
think we can think of probably a better like for
the for the individuals subsidized food product like granola or something,
you know, I mean, what about the grain farmers only
(33:46):
need help to But it's crazy, you guys. I just
sent a link in the chat um. I was just
googling government cheese and an eBay listing came up for
a cardboard packaging box. It's like vintage. It's like like
sixty dollars on eBay. Uh, and it says pasteurized process
American cheese donated by US Department of Agriculture for food
(34:07):
help programs, not to be sold or exchanged. It just
says it all there, and it's like, there's that's it's
literally helping the government. It's not helping the people that
need you know, better food. Well, it's like helping them
is is kind of a side effects. It's cyclical together, right, Yeah,
(34:27):
But there's there's nothing wrong with multitasking, you know. And
if you're not hurting anybody and you're satisfying two things
at once, it's it's understandable, but aren't you They are
hurting people because she's clogs your arteries if you're eating
it like for every meal, and it and it leads
to this, like I think obesity at pepademic that we
have and like you know, heart heart disease, one of
(34:48):
the unhealthiest countries in the world. And I would argue
that the government is culpable in that. And on two
separate occasions in t sixteen, first in August and then
on October uh the FEDS announced they were gonna quote
bail out dairy farmers. They were gonna purchase twenty million
dollars more worth of surplus dairy products a kh cheese
(35:11):
to distribute in food pantries and some milk as well.
As this is occurring, by the way, as this surplus
is increasing, there's a global drop in demand for dairy.
Plus there's that technology we mentioned that's making cows give
more milk, which results in the lowest milk prices since
(35:31):
the Great Recession, not depression, but Great Recession ended in
two thousand and nine. This is something we alluded to
in our listener mail segment. Farmers were literally pouring gallons
and gallons and gallons of unsold milk into holes in
the ground. Fifty million gallons. That's according to the U
(35:52):
s DA itself in in August letter Uh, the National
Milk Producers Federation asked the U. S d A for
a bailout of a hundred and fifty million dollars. This
was an ongoing, continual issue. It just kind of like
would reach a crisis point, maybe go down one step
(36:13):
and then go up two steps, down one step. It
was an incremental increase and this led to the creation
of something with a somewhat innocuous Dame Dairy Management Incorporated.
Their website is super wholesome. As wholesome as a kid
in the nineteen fifties drinking a glass of milk. Can
I just say, there's got to be a better way
to dispose of fifty million gallons of milk and pouring
(36:33):
it into a hole in the ground that's gonna be
the smelliest hole ever. I can't imagine. I can't imagine
that's going to be this So, yes, we're keeping it.
So this is it's I mean, it's true because milk
doesn't have a very long shelf life, you know what
(36:56):
I mean? And you could say, why don't we distribute
this as part of an international aid or charity thing? Um,
But if you've listened to our previous episodes on farming
in the US and across the world. You know, farmers
are often put in a very risky situation with a
(37:16):
lot of forces that are beyond their control. So it
is understandable, as strange as it sounds, that they might
be in a situation where it is literally less expensive
for them to get rid of the milk than it
is to try to transport it somewhere and pay for
the gas and pay for the storage. And Dairy Management, Inc.
(37:36):
Was set to was set to try to solve this
the They were created by something called the National Dairy
Promotion Board in the mid nineties. Here's what they do.
Their job is to act as an umbrella company for
state and local programs promoting the dairy industry. In blunt terms, folks,
(37:58):
this organization was the quasi governmental organization was explicitly created
to push as much milk, cheese, butter, and yogurt as
possible into products and into people, both in the US
and in other countries. They're the hidden hand behind what
(38:19):
appears to be rising cheese consumption. They're the group behind
Got Milk. That campaign we mentioned. Everybody remembers Got Milk
there were Uh. It started with like some normal you know, models,
commercial lactors, and then it escalated to like celebrities and
everybody would have a little little milk mustache, right, and
(38:39):
then what they're called, yes sir, that we saw in
subway stations, you saw them in billboards as television commercials.
It was absolutely ubiquitous. I mean, it's the kind of
campaign that clearly a lot, a lot, a lot of
money and marketing resources went into. Yeah, it's it was.
It was direct to your eyes and ears advertising, that's
(39:00):
what they did. And it was an era defining too.
We think of it and it like almost defines like
that period in history in our minds. It's like a
nostalgia thing at this point, right, Yeah, in a weird
way their their mind lobbyists for on the individual level
of people sitting there watching television you know which which
(39:20):
was television shows? Man think about as especially kids watching
TV shows with all of those like us, I think
our generation, I mean it is the nineties, we got
hit hard with the got Milk campaign with a lot
of the promotion of dairy products and we it and
it formed a lot in in our minds. We're gonna
(39:43):
tell you a lot of these other things that you're
going to remember, probably from your childhood and growing up,
that that this company was behind I'm gonna pause it
again here. I believe wholeheartedly that the Ninja Turtles Tell
Division show that I watched as a child had some
(40:04):
kind of behind the scenes interaction with this group to
get me to like and want pizza all the time.
I think I think they're behind it. I can't prove it.
I think you're right. And this goes to This also
goes to Ryan's original question about the origin of the
cheese powder used in mac and Cheese. Uh want a pause.
(40:26):
We've got some of our fellow listeners who are who
are gonna You're gonna meet at the end of the
episode on Twitter with their cheese punts of their own.
But I wanted to point out this excellent tweet we
got from someone who lived in Wisconsin. Uh, this is Steph,
and Steph, you said, one of my favorite things while
living in Wisconsin were the billboards that were just black
(40:47):
text on a yellow field that said cheese, no other
info needed. They knew why you were there. And that's
like that. Whenever you see those really vague this is
an important point. Whenever you see those really vague prommercials
that are not about a specific brand name or product.
They're just about a kind of thing, right Like got
(41:07):
milk is never saying, you know, go like, it's not
Greenfield pastures milk. It's just the idea of freaking milk. Exactly, yes, exactly.
If that's what's for dinner, it's what's for dinner. I
love those kind of commercials, you know, I want to
see more of them where um. You know, sometimes they're wholesome,
(41:28):
they're thing. They're like literacy movements. They're like read books.
We don't care which one. Uh so we see we
see this, and what they're What d m I is
doing at this time in the in their early days
is um, like you said, Matt, they're doing direct to
consumer advertising. They're they're playing there. They are playing literal
(41:51):
burnet style mind games. They want you to be thinking
about milk. That wants you to be thinking about cheese
and yogurt when you're in the grocery store. Dream about it,
dream about it. I really want some cheese right now.
The dairy rainbow. So I don't know why dairy rainbow
(42:11):
makes me uncomfortable, but yeah, so something happened though in
the late nine, people in this country began eating out
more often. They were going to restaurants and stuff. They
weren't cooking as often at home. So d M I
did what Corporate America calls a pivot, and they started
working with companies that sold food to people in fast
(42:36):
food joints, in restaurants and what is it called approachable
fine dining? You know in in uh in the hallowed halls,
the Chilies, and the t g I f s throughout
the nation. But what about what about them quick them
quick food places? What do you call them? The fast
food joints? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell. We
(43:00):
kid you not. They have been infiltrating. How weird is
that they have been infiltrated by t M I. Uh Like,
think about this. If you're nineties kid, you know, and
you you enjoyed book It, you enjoyed that personal pan pizza,
you probably you probably have this memory, yeah duds off
(43:22):
to crust pizza in Yeah, and specifically from maybe you
don't even remember eating it necessarily, but you certainly remember
seeing that cheese pull when and then the whole notion
of eating your pizza backwards. That was the whole impetus
behind us, and a little old guy, uh we might
have heard of named Donald Trump appeared in some of
(43:45):
those ads, um eating his pizza backwards and making it
sound like, you know, I'm Donald Trump, and I'm obviously
a smart guy, and I eat my pizza backwards because
that's just what you do, idiots. I think they cut
the part where he said it. That would have been funny,
That would have been edgy for nineties kid. But I
think you're right. Eating pizza backwards was already this new, exciting, weird,
(44:09):
cool thing. Uh. And by the end of the year,
this initiative had increased Pizza Hut sales by three million,
which sounds like a lot of money, but really it's
it's about a seven percent improvement over the previous year.
But still, think about all that extra cheese that went
(44:32):
in each one of those pizza pies. And if you
think about if you've got a stuffed crust pizza with
extra cheese, good god, d M. I is just killing
it here. Yeah, they're killing it, and they're killing you
slowly from the inside out. Greater good. If you eat
too much stuffed crust, eventually you become the stuffed crust yourself.
(44:54):
That's that's the problem. But you know, this reminds me.
I was trying to find while we're researching this um
between our listener mail and this episode, I was trying
to find this tweet that I loved from a while back.
It was someone I didn't know very well, but they
posted this this kind of explicit So Paul, please beat me. Uh.
(45:14):
Someone said, I was on a marketing call years ago
with Pete, with marketing people at Pizza Hut, and this
one guy said, we do it with what stuffed crust pizza.
No one asked us about that, We just did it.
And then the tweet ended. I think about that guy
a lot, and I love I love that idea that
(45:38):
someone is so gangster about stuffed crust. But now it
makes a little bit more sense because they had help
from the illuminati of cheese. They're not the only example. Uh,
Taco Bell is a huge example. Remember at the top,
we said the case a Loupa is going to come
into play in two thousand and twelve, a d M
I operative, we could call them that food scientists. It
(46:01):
was probably a fantastic person. We haven't spoken with her
directly named Lisa McClintock started working with the Taco Bell
product development team. Pause here for a second, Taco Bell fans,
does that not sound kind of like a dream job?
Like you go home from work and you're stressed out
(46:22):
and and your roommates or your partner, your friends are
are saying, oh, hey, what's got you down, and you're
like kicking rocks and you're like, they're just not They're
just not listening. With the burrito design, Okay, you don't
want leakage and I don't. I don't, And you're like, yeah,
you're like Samantha, they don't get my vision. Think about
(46:44):
the beauty. I mean, we've talked about it before, about
the beauty of Taco Bell and pizza. At some of
these other places, you've got a limited number of ingredients,
but anything you can do to create a new product
out of those ingredients can bring in millions and millions
of dollars. And that's like Mexican food, or at least
(47:04):
Americanized Mexican food in general, right, where like everything on
the menu is kind of a different combination of like
five or six ingredients. Taco Bell takes it to the extreme,
and you know, injects massive marketing dollars into it. Ben,
you were talking about what the case Uh what, there's
also the case Arito. Let's not forget about the case rito.
(47:27):
And when you look at it on the Taco Bell website, Um,
the cheese pouring forth from it is clearly that powdered
yellow stuff. Like there's not an ounce of actual cheese
in this. I'm I'm conjecturing it's just it's this the
wrong color. It's like this kind of weird beige yellow, pale,
odd color. When you see it pulling apart in this
(47:48):
perfectly symmetrical image. Uh, it also has just an insane
amount of saturated fat um and just more you know,
sodium than anyone should probably consume in a day. Um.
But it's absolutely true, Ben, it's genius marketing paired with
this actual conspiracy in this idea, we gotta move some
cheese units. Yeah. So Lisa McClintock started working with the
(48:13):
senior manager for product Development, Steve Gomez over Taco Bell,
and they said, we need to develop a new kind
of cheese, a new cheese filling, a new kind of cheese,
a new kind of cheese. You say, here at the
Taco Bell so, uh yeah, I'm at the food science lab,
I'm at the Taco Bell, I'm at the combination food
(48:36):
science and Taco Bell. There there's stretching and so they
want to make a stretchy cheese that that pulls like
taffy when it's heated. They want to figure out how
to mass produce it, and they want to invent some
proprietary machinery to make this. And the proprietary machinery is
really interesting, really clever. Point. So this the result of
(49:00):
this experimentation is something called the case Lupa, and I
think the case of Rito is clearly part of this too.
The case a Loupa, as you mentioned earlier, has five
times as much cheese as a basic crunchy taco. Taco
Bell had to buy four point seven million pounds of
cheese just too produce the shells. So that puts the
(49:22):
dent in that one point three billion pounds surplus. It's
weird if you read, if you read interviews with people
who are in Taco Bell management at the time, then
they will say, you know, for the longest time, we
thought cheese, sour cream stuff like that was kind of
more of a garnish or an add on to our products,
(49:43):
but now it's one of the main things beef and cheese,
So cheese use at Taco Bell since they partnered with
DMA it's increased by over twenty and that's that's why
d m I gets this strange, somewhat half sinister, half
hilarious nickname, the Illuminati of Cheese. We're gonna pause for
(50:07):
word from our sponsors. I'm wondering. I'm wondering too, and
we'll be back. We'll be back to explore some more
of unintended consequences of this again active ongoing conspiracy. Do
you guys think the Bacon Illuminati worked with Wendy's when
(50:29):
they came up with a bacon eater? D m I
definitely did. And we're back. Here's the thing. There's there's
no if and or but about it. D m I
will tell you and you speak with him that their
(50:50):
work has helped slow America's declining desire for dairy And
it's true that she demand for cheese is going like this,
and demand for milk is going like this. Uh so
do that do that for the non visual yes? So?
(51:13):
Uh if you look at a grid in your head, uh,
demand for cheese is starting at the lower left corner
and it's going all the way to the top right.
Demand for milk is starting sort of midway up your
y axis, and it's going down into the right beautiful networks. Okay,
So demand for milk has gone from thirty five pounds
(51:37):
per person in nine seventy five to fifteen pounds today.
So they've they've it's reversed. Like what was it? No,
I think, as you said, um, demand for uh, cheese
was what fourteen something? Oh yeah, that's right. In n
(51:58):
Americans were consuming fourteen pound of cheese. Then in like
essentially the modern day, it's around forty five pounds of
cheese per person per year. Milk has decreased a ton, right, Yeah,
I think it was a two close to fifty pounds
per person in nineteen and uh in um more like
one s So a significant decrease. And this is effective
(52:22):
for the a lot of the stakeholders, not counting the consumers.
Texas A and M economists did a cost benefit analysis
and in two thousand twelve they found that for every
single dollar a dairy producer invests in d M I UH,
they get two dollars and fourteen cents worth of return
(52:44):
for milk, four dollars twenty six cents worth of return
for cheese, and nine dollars in sixty three cents return
for butter. So yeah, so investing in d m I,
if you're if you're a dairy person, this is this
really helped. But of course, as we said, d m
(53:05):
I has, by nature of its mission its endeavor. They
have promoted lots of saturated fat, lots of cholesterol. Eating
cheese can add up. And for a federal agency that
is dedicated to improving overall nutrition and giving dietary guidance,
(53:26):
these partnerships can seem kind of like a contradiction, right,
Oh yeah, absolutely, And experts out there who talk about
this would completely agree with you. Ben. Uh. There's there's
a food oppression expert named Andrea Freeman who believes that
you know this, This group d m e s efforts
(53:48):
quote impose health costs on Americans generally, but disproportionately harm
low income African Americans and Latinos who live in urban
centers dominated by fast food restaurants. And we've just described
how these two giant, well now one giant chains that
(54:09):
we at least all went to when we were younger,
Like my family still eats at some of these restaurants. Um,
in these fast food chains, you can see where d
m I had large impacts at least on those brands
slash companies. And you can definitely see that. You can
see the evidence of what what Andrew Freeman is saying
(54:30):
here just in what we described with Pizza Hut and
Taco Bell. You can really see it. Yeah. And you know,
also farmers themselves aren't entirely on board with d m I,
because some will argue this primarily helps out the big guys,
the big dairy players, and not the family farms or
the smaller outfits. And that's a that's a valid criticism.
(54:52):
We see that happening with other parts of what is
called agribusiness on a high level. But either way, it
app yours. The cheesy Illuminati is real and is set
to stay. At this point, we want to pass the
torch to you folks who want to get a sense
of what you think, because there there there's a web
(55:14):
of connections. Here is this number one. A good idea
is this um. You know, some of us may argue
it's too much government intervention. Some of us may say
it's too dishonest for the public. Other people may say,
well it is overall, it's more beneficial that it is damaging.
We want to we want to hear from you. And
(55:35):
because we purposely wanted this to be to be a
lighter episode, and we promised some puns. Uh, we went
on Twitter uh and asked people if they would if
they would like to help us out with some puns.
So the tweet I put out, which is terrible, was
about to record this cheese episode. If you'd like to
(55:58):
be a part of the show, hit us up in
your favorite cheese puns in the next hour or so.
Dot dot dot This will be a guda one. Oh man, God,
I hate it. I hate Why do we do this? Anyway?
Here's here are some responses from your fellow listeners. Vaults
of x Talk, who we all know and love here
(56:19):
on the show, says, e damn, it has an eat um.
I'm assuming I can't think of any that would be
good enough for you eating cheese. No, that's not what
I meant to say. Eat Um. Is that a cheese ye? Yes? Um?
(56:41):
But then Vaults Vaults follows up with and now I'm
getting a pop up ad hot cheese singles in your area.
Thanks guys, that's great um our own O world, close
friends and colleague that you've heard on our show before.
Annie Reese Uh, one of the co creators and co
host the Amazing Saver podcast, says, unbreathlievable. You're too big
(57:07):
of a cheese to ask for my pun expertise. Now,
you munster spelled how I want to think? Yeah, cheese puns,
you monster, you relieve you're mildly cheddar than us. I
camembart being so fed up. That's funny because there were
some crossovers there between those two. Yeah, and then what
(57:28):
our buddy Nick Takowsky did a good one. I'd step up,
but I got the blues pretty bad this week. B
l e U s y and good friend of the show,
the one and only Mike Johns, who recently had a birthday.
Mike is a colleague of ours, a fantastic writer, musician,
producer here in Atlanta. Uh. He says something encouraging. He says,
(57:50):
you've got some pretty sharp followers. You chedd to get
some good suggestions here. I've got half a rind to
suggest a few, but I don't want to wedge myself
into the conversation. Wow, okay, here we go. Um, let's see,
he kept going by the way. Yeah, could we This
is one from at grape Whanger. That's a great twitter
(58:14):
named vigil um. Could we not craft less cheesy puns? Craft? No,
we can't wangerh Wow? Can we kind of jump to
Andy really quickly? Andy? He said, Ben, I believe you
have enough puns for us all but fed us safe
(58:35):
and sorry, here's a joke. What hotel do cheese lovers
stay in? The Stilton? Wonderful? My Stilton Honors Club can't
wait for that? And then uh, Steph, who we mentioned earlier,
says I'd make a joke about American cheese, but it
wouldn't age well. Shots fired, Shots fired. You can find
(58:59):
you can find more of these puns. We'd love to
hear your your favorite cheese puns or your least favorite
if you hate puns and ignored our warning and sat
through this episode. And equally importantly, we'd like to hear, um,
what what you think about these kind of things. They're
part of what's known as check off programs. We mentioned
(59:20):
this earlier. The idea is that it is so important
to have your own domestic sources of food that you
will you know, you'll go out of your way to
support them more than you may some other businesses. Oh
and uh, Jenna V. Says sweet dreams are made of cheese. Cheese.
(59:42):
Oh am, I to breathe. We gotta get out of
this the Paul. I can feel Paul growing so uh
so let us know your thoughts. We can't wait to
hear from you. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right. You can find us on the end your
net where you can also find that vintage government cheese
(01:00:03):
box that I mentioned. The listing is still live on
eBay if you're if you're down for that, um, just
search for vintage Government cheese box on eBay. I think
the bid is up to around sixty bucks. But if
you're looking for us, you can find us on Instagram
or we are conspiracy stuff show Twitter and Facebook or
were conspiracy stuff. You can also give us a telephone call.
We are one eight three three s T d W
(01:00:24):
y t K. Hit him with it, Matt, Yeah, hit
him with the rules. I was gonna hey, is there
a hey? Is there a cheese that rhymes with hey? Yes?
When you call, please tell us the name you would
like for us to refer to you as, doesn't have
to be your real name, could be a code name
like Doc Holiday or Mission Control. Super cool. Then let
(01:00:48):
us know if we can use your message on air.
That's very helpful for us. Thank you, lawyers say cheers.
Then leave your message. Please only call once per subject,
that would be very helpful as well. And if you've
got a message you want to say personally to us,
please put it right in the end. There you've got
a quick update. This justin. Uh, code named dot Holiday
(01:01:11):
adds that have our tie and grew yer are are
very high on our list. And I just I promised
her we would mention that, Oh that's important. It's important stuff.
And you call us tell us your favorite cheese is
what you know about the cheese spiracy going on here?
Whenever you're front, that's perfect, that's right, oh man. And uh,
(01:01:35):
if you don't want to do that stuff, you don't
want to leave us a message, you don't want to
find us on the internet, definitely check out the YouTube
channel conspiracy stuff over there. And if you have something
to tell us and you want to send links or
you wanna, you know, really write a lot of stuff out.
Please use our good old fashioned email address. We are
conspirat cheese at i heeart radio dot com, conspiracy at
(01:01:57):
iHeart radio dot com. Yeah, stuff they don't want you
(01:02:18):
to know. Is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nol.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul Mission Controlled deconds. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. This is a follow up
from an earlier Listener Male segment where our fellow conspiracy
(00:47):
realist Ryan hipped us to a strange story about cheese
in the United States. We talked a little bit about
our favorite cheese commercials. I mean, some of that is
clearly a genre now. You know, it's sometimes called although
I hate the name food porn. Uh, we all know
what we're talking about. The slow motion clips of like
(01:09):
um no, you had a good example of a mozzarella
stick that's a classic being pulled. And then we had
you know, Taco bell Que, Sadilla's Casa Lupas, which play
a big role here and uh, this this kind of
commercial is almost a troupe nowadays. And in fact, there
are trendy restaurants of plenty in this country dedicated entirely
(01:31):
to one sort of cheesy food or another. Like, have
you guys ever been to a macaroni and cheese restaurant
or a place that only sells grilled cheese sandwiches. It's
very New York. Yeah, there's a place I went to.
I think it was in Oakland. It was called Homework
or something like that. I was meant to evoke feelings
of like childhood and like lunch room stuff, but it
(01:51):
was these bespoke kind of personal pan like little um,
you know, those dishes that are meant to be put
in the oven, kind of like bakeware or whatever, like
little Dutch oven kind of guys, with baccaroni and cheese
of all different flavors and varieties. And it was obviously
very overpriced for mac and cheese, but it was delicious. Um.
What about fawn Do you guys have been to a
(02:11):
fawn do restaurant? There's a chain here in Atlanta. I
think it's called the Melting Pot or something like that.
For me, it was all about the pirate ship. Oh,
Dante is down the hatch. You're Dante's guy, Yeah it
was so good. Uh yeah, we yea grilled cheese food trucks.
(02:34):
Do not sleep on those in Atlanta. There are a
ton of them, uh, grilled cheese food trucks. Guys. Oh
so we're we're both cheesy and fans of cheese. So
if you do not like this is the weirdest trigger
warning we've ever done. If you do not like puns,
this is not the episode for you, and you should
(02:54):
just go to the next episode. But but the thing is,
you know, a long time listens, you know, I have
a personal obsession with Casa Dilla's. They're basic, They're kind
of a grilled cheese, I would argue. Um. And in fact, folks,
all of us here at this stuff, they don't want
you to know. Team we all love cheese and we
all love talking about food, and we wanted to make
(03:16):
sure that was an accurate statement. So right before we
went to air, I went ahead and pained our super
producer code named Doc Holiday, and said, Matt and I
worked on how to write this question. Said, hey, Doc,
this is a work question. Do you like cheese? If so,
what kind? Doc says, I love cheese, but I don't
(03:37):
eat it as much as I would. And she kind
of alluded to, you know, health concerns, but she says,
I am literally the eating shredded cheese out of the
bag person. So we're gonna hit her with same we're
reading this on air, sorry, doc So. And you know
Paul michion Control look Horse, one of the one of
(03:57):
the prime uh champ beans of apple Bees loves cheese.
Matt Old, do you guys have a favorite cheese or
or you are? Yes? Old cheese kind of kind of
crewe Yeah, I mean, I guess all cheeses aren't really
created equal. I'll tell you what I think does get
slept on a little bit is just good old fashioned
American cheese product, you know, not even properly. It's like
(04:18):
I wouldn't like I like it on I'll tell you
what I like it on melted, because it melts beautifully
on like breakfast biscuit, like an egg and a sausage
on a biscuit, and you to slap that cheese product on.
We're gonna get into this um and it just melts
beautifully and it's its own thing and a lot of
like kind of cool breakfast divy type joints do that too.
(04:38):
But I am I like a I like a funky cheese,
you know, like a little bit of a foot smell
to cheese. Well, I don't like you ever had a raclette.
Raclette as a one. It's like a Swiss one that
also has its own kind of fondue situation where you
melted over meats and stuff on this special little grill
(05:00):
that's and you drink a lot of vodka with it,
which is a bonus. Man, that sounds good for my money, Yeah,
for my money. It's you combine let's say, a pecan
slash pecan with some kind of dried fruit and a
goat cheese. Mix those together with anything else. You're good
to go. Oh yeah, baby, yeah right. I'm I'm pretty
(05:24):
uh as you guys know, I am pretty non discriminatory
when it comes to food in general. Uh. Doc says
that her favorites are gorgonzola, blue cheese, and gouda. Uh
And when we were talking about this, you probably have
your own favorite cheese, conspiracy realist, just statistically, but we're
(05:46):
talking about this, we're talking about a national phenomenon. Cheese
is almost a staple. Lights. Cheese is a staple nowadays
in the US, and it can be weird if you
travel to other countries where cheese is not really a thing. Uh.
And you know you wouldn't see it very often in
a in your normal grocery store or market. You probably
(06:08):
only run into it if you went to like up
pizza restaurant or something of that nature. But in different
parts of the world that are historically not on board
with cheese, uh, it is still like a growing industry.
So here are the facts. Before we get into the conspiracy. Folks,
you have to realize cheese is, as the younger humans
(06:32):
would say, popular a f in the US unless you
are lactose intolerant, unless you're vegan or have some other
dietary restriction. Odds are you have consumed some cheese recently.
This wasn't always the case. We'll get to it. Um.
We are adventurous cheese eaters. But if you're the average American,
(06:54):
you know one of your favorite cheeses, or the one
you consume most often, is gonna be cheddar. And there
are health concerns that come into cheese consumption. But I
suggest we put those two as to the side for
a moment. Uh, to the side of our cheese plate,
and look at just the straight consumption, because this is
(07:15):
for cheesemakers. Uh, this sounds like a resounding success story.
So if you start back in the mid nineteen seventies,
let's say nineteen seventy five, you're an average American. Look
at you, so are we. We are all average Americans.
We consumed around fourteen pounds of cheese. That's in a year.
(07:36):
So in a year's time, you would eat fourteen pounds
of cheese. Now, if you went to a deli right now,
wherever you are, and you said, give me a pound
of cheese, that seems like a lot right now, those
it does. I think you typically order your cheese and
maybe a quarter pounds, right. I think a quarter pound
(07:56):
of cheese is respectable. And if you've got a family,
it's half a pound or pound. That's just the way
you gotta go. I am a family, family of one.
Look that's my this is my experience. So perhaps I'm wrong,
but you know, just imagine fourteen pounds. That seems like
(08:17):
a lot already. It in my opinion, maybe that's wrong,
but it's not. It's not as much as it has
grown to. Yeah, you're right, Matt, it's skyrocketed as of
nineteen and this is a number that continued to rise
during the pandemic. But as of the average US consumer
was eating around forty four zero point four pounds of
(08:41):
cheese per year. Yeah, yeah, and uh that's just the
tip of the cheeseburg or we're keeping it. For the
past ten years, US per capita consumption of cheese has
risen even more, uh over five pounds um from that point.
(09:03):
And as this began to happen, we had other dairy
categories that had largely remained unchanged or were flat or
had even fallen UM. Things like consumption of fluid milk
had plummeted from two forty seven pounds per person in
the N two hundred and forty six pounds, Which makes sense.
I mean, like we've talked about, I think on the
(09:25):
the cheese segment on the listener mail. You know, there
were all these amazing ad campaigns, you know, to get
milk back up milk drinking about how it's good for
your bones and calcium and and got milk and all
of that. Uh. Now, I think most people think of
milk as an ingredient rather than a beverage. Unto itself
like something you add to a smoothie or using making
a cake. But it doesn't seem very in vogue to
(09:48):
just drink milk as a refreshing beverage, unless unless you're
a kid. Uh, you know, a lot of parents still
give their children milk. Like in the waters, I give
my son milk cow's milk, um and we have, we
have for a long time. But the the ability to
this always so interesting. The ability to digest lactose in
(10:11):
adulthood is a relatively recent mutation in part of the
human species, and it's far from uniform. Uh. So sometimes
it's funny because if you if you watch television or film, uh,
you'll see the consumption of drinking milk is almost always
a statement. Now it's not the only time you'd see
(10:33):
it as like a quote unquote normal everyday thing. Is
if it's an indicator of time and place, so like
our story takes place in the nineteen fifties or something,
or if it's one of those tremendously irritating breakfast scenes
where there's this huge you know that, like there's this
huge spread and they got juice and they got water,
(10:53):
and they got coffee and they got milk, and then
the guy, like the patriarch or the kid there or
whomever's running through the house and they're they're like getting
calls and they look at this and they like take
half a bite of toast, and they're like, all right,
love you, honey, gotta go, And no one mentions you monster.
I did all this work. I made you this continental
(11:14):
breakfast type situation. You didn't need all that, but I
did it for you because I love you. You couldn't
even bother yourself to eat more than a bite of toast.
I want a divorce. That's that's where that goes. But no,
it's true. Milk is not nearly as popular as it
used to be. I like chocolate milk. I think that's
still probably flies off the shells pretty well, but it's
(11:36):
something you put in your coffee. Now. I think I
got a sideways story for you guys, real quick about
you know, the urban legend or the rumor about chocolate milk, right,
the bad milk. Yeah, that it's the milk with the
clots in it, with the blood clots, chocolate everything. For me, well,
back in the back in the day, that may have
(11:57):
been more true than it is today. You're probably safe
thanks to federal health standards, So please enjoy your chocolate milk. Also,
try you who if you haven't yet. It's a good
it's a good you who is to chocolate milk? What
those cheese slices are to cheese? You? Who is a
chocolate drink product? Right? There's any real milk or chocolate
(12:19):
in that beverage like a powder. But but yeah, we're
we're inundated with cheese in the US. It's officially a
cheesy country and a cheesy people. How did we get here? Well,
there are some easy, kind of fun answers. First, the
popularity of cheese owes a ton to the rise of pizza,
(12:41):
and I, for one, I'm grateful for the rise of pizza.
I know it's maybe not the same as the legit
pizza con I know it's absolutely not the same as
legit pizza created in Italy. But because of pizza alone,
mozzarella went from being kind of this obscure thing you'd
see it a fancy cheese place to one of the
most popular varieties of cheese in the country. Like around
(13:05):
like cheddar status, which is Cheddar is like the Kanye
West of cheese In the state. And was that an
accidental pun the rise of pizza? No, wait, yes, yes
it was. I didn't think about just checking that, checking
one of those off the list. If anyone wants to
make a drinking game out of this, yes, we all
are not accidental or not. We have a list of uh,
I think we all have. We've got a mental list
(13:27):
of puns. So again, this is gonna be pun heavy.
We've done some pretty serious, kind of dark episodes that
were we think very important, so we wanted to take
We're recorded on a Friday, folks. We wanted to do
something that was not immensely depressing. So well, you're right.
Just to get to the concept that cheese owes pizza
(13:48):
a lot of gratitude, at least as an industry, as
a food thing. Uh, really think about think about the
local pizza chain that maybe you grew up with. Then
also think about the big ones, the Dominoes, the pizza
huts eventually the Papa John's and the Goodfellas and the
ccs and all these other ones. When when you all
(14:10):
of a sudden, you had companies that could just deliver
you food, which wasn't a big thing in a lot
of places, and for a lot of companies, delivering food
was not a big thing, but it kind of changed
the game and how Americans got food and the other thing.
Just to really remember here, these aren't Italian companies bringing
(14:32):
you know, Italian pizza that's done correctly in the Italian way.
These are American companies that are creating food products with
relatively cheap ingredients where they can make a ton of
money on Uh So it's just a it's a very
different it's a very different thing. Um, we don't have
to get all into pizza that. We can leave that
(14:53):
to the saver folks, but uh yeah, definitely shout out
what it's telling we see all the time. Right, it's
like bastardization and sort of like um, I don't know,
co opting of like culture and turning it into this
sort of like product that can be mass marketed. And
I think, uh, these chain pizza restaurants are exactly that.
(15:14):
Because you go to like a Antiko's really awesome pizza
joint here in Atlanta, are anywhere you know that your
name your pizza joint of choice that is like a
little more traditional, you know, it's not covered in shredded cheese.
It has like a slice of like buffalo mozzarella, like
a little circle doll up on the top, and that's
what you get. And it's delicious and it's very delicate
(15:36):
and light h and it's not you don't get that
massive cheese pull. You get like one. But you know again,
they've got bags and bags and pounds and thousands and
thousands of tons of this stuff that they're trying to ship,
they're trying to sell, and it's like, uh, it is
a conspiracy between big pizza and big cheese. Well, let's
let's step back a second before we use the C word. So,
uh well, let's keep painting the picture, right. Did did
(16:00):
someone who went on the found Dominoes and Pizza Hut
go to Italy and say, look at this anything you
can do, I can do feeda or was this just
a natural outgrowth of changing trends and taste in the
American public? Did it happen as marketers would put it, organically?
(16:20):
We know that part of the that We know that
pizza has also given a lot of heft to shredded cheese,
in particular, about six billion dollars of the natural cheese
categories shredded cheese and uh, this the natural cheese category. Overall,
(16:42):
there is a little less than eighteen billion. We're talking
a lot of money here. During the coronavirus pandemic, Kraft Hinds,
which is a giant in the food industry, said it
saw an unprecedented double digit growth in this sale of
those craft singles, which is in the rest of the
world people would probably call that American cheese. It's those
(17:04):
processed yellow cheese slices we're talking about. But pizza and
a pandemic and organic taste cannot entirely explain America's weird
relationship with cheese. When we look into the dawn of
the American Age of cheesiness, we were surprised to find
(17:24):
there is literally a conspiracy of foot not a conspiracy theory,
not something that happened in the past. It is going
odd today. As as we pointed out, there really is
a thing called big cheese. And they're after you. What
are we talking about. We'll tell you after a word
from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. So we've
(17:53):
all heard of government cheese, right, We'll get to that.
And if you, if you were in eighties or nineties, kid,
you would doubtlessly heard of this stuff, even if you
never saw it in person. But when we're talking about cheese,
really talking about milk, right, because you can't have cheat, well,
(18:14):
you can't have good cheese without milk, that's right. So
let's that's that's wind the clock back to the good
old nineteen eighties, the late eighties on the cusp of
the nineties, that that gray period where it sort of
still feels like the one era, but things are starting
to change a little bit. Night seven the mediaan dairy
farm had eighty cows or fewer. Uh. Today that number
(18:34):
is closer to nine hundred. So economies of scale drive
costs down and bolster output. Right. So on top of that,
you've got the average cow producing more milk than ever before,
and that is because of better breeding practices. They've kind
of figured it out and honed it down to a
science to get the most output for their buck. Uh.
(18:55):
And there are also those like heinous machines that you've
seen in like some of the factory production of milk.
I like the phrase heinous machines. That sounds like a
good album named I agree, but I think we all
know we're talking about those kind of like dystopian sci
fi milk suction cup tube machines that we're talking about, Matt. Yeah,
(19:16):
and some of them are completely fine. I mean, well,
who's who's to say people would argue that fact, but um,
many are less impactful on the cows than others. U
some I would use the term heinus. So yeah, anyway,
at the very least, it doesn't seem pleasant for the animal, right, Yeah, absolutely,
(19:37):
But as we know in our previous work on livestock conspiracies,
the feeling of the animal being used doesn't often come
into play. And there's also we should also, by the way,
folks do a an episode in the future on chicken farms,
just chicken, chicken, the chicken industry, poultry industry in particular.
(19:58):
It's bad, bad, I learn some weird stuff. But wait,
this is our light episode. We're keeping it light. Sorry, sorry, guys,
We're back to it. So you know what it is,
even at the cost I mean, and it's hard to
even talk about, but at the cost of the experience
of the cow. The whole point of all of that production,
(20:21):
it's to get more food for humans that need food.
In theory. In theory, yes, because it's responding to a market. Right,
there's a need for this milk, so we must produce
more of it. How do we do that more efficiently? Well,
this is how So I just put that out there.
Yeah there is a logic, Yeah, there is a logic.
(20:42):
The farmers weren't sitting around saying, how can we make
things worse? People don't usually think that way. And you know, often,
especially in smaller farms, they have a very human connection
with their livestock, you know, and they and they want
they want these cow us to live good lives and
be happy. Because if the cow is in a good
(21:04):
mental state, because it is a higher order mammal, if
it's in a good mental state, then that's going to
affect its diet, it's nutrition, and therefore the milk it produces.
We have to acknowledge at this point the dairy industry,
and we're talking about uh, several years or decades so ago,
they were not just producing milk for a domestic consumer,
(21:27):
they were producing it for other countries. And then a
crash hit China's economy slowed down. This drove the global
demand from milk down. At the same time, the EU
said they had had these domestic caps on how much
milk a European or EU farmer could produce, and they
remove those caps, so all of a sudden, the EU
(21:50):
is making a bunch of milk, which means they need
less from the US. Russia slapped sanctions on foeign cheese
because they were mad about some Western sanctions, and then
the US dollar was stronger, and that meant that American
dairy farmers had to sell milk at a more expensive
rate internationally. And these factors combined into this like bubbly
(22:12):
caso dip of problems. There was a massive ongoing cheese glut.
There was not a tortilla chip of a solution. Insight,
This did not occur in a vacuum at all historically,
because if you look back, you'll see that the US
government has a very long history of supporting dairy farmers
when prices collapse, through through subsidies, through marketing campaigns, through
(22:39):
government cheese. Uh, maybe we we should talk a little
bit about government cheese, I think before we continue, what
do you guys say? I think we should because I,
for the longest time sort of thought it was a joke,
um that it was sort of a euphemism for, you know,
welfare in some way. But it turns out it's a
real thing. It's an actual cheese product that the government
(23:01):
would distribute to low income individuals UH and families UM
in place of money or as a supplement to their
you know nutrition. Right. Yeah, it's processed cheese. It's been
around since the World Wars. It was used in military
consitions during World War Two. It's been in schools since
(23:21):
the nineteen fifties. So if you went to a public
school in the US, you probably at some point did
eat government cheese. It got a it became politically charged
because it was associated with welfare beneficiaries, people who received
food stamps or SNAP, people who are elderly and got
Social Security checks, and then people who visited food banks.
(23:44):
But there's absolutely nothing shameful about that. And and you know,
odds are outside of schools. We've got plenty of people
in our audience today who have at some point been
on government assistance. And not to a box too much,
but yeah, you should not feel bad about it. That
is what that assistance is there for. Every time you
(24:06):
buy something and Uncle Sam takes a little it takes
a little vig from you at the cash register. It's
supposed to go back to you in some way. Yeah,
I'm not gonna lie. I was myself when I was
a young new parent, um, you know, kind of getting
started in my career. Even before really I was there
was a period where we were living with my my
(24:26):
mom um when my daughter was born, and we got
a little bit of government assistance for a brief period
of time when we lived in Athens, Georgia. It was
actually kind of great because they had a system where
you could use those SNAP benefits to shop at the
local farmers market and you would get to to one
um value for your Snap dollars. So that was actually
(24:48):
a really progressive, great way of doing it, I thought,
And it would also support local farmers and that's that's
part of that's part of what this uh, that's part
of the good intention behind programs like this. The cheese, though,
where did all this government cheese come from? That's the question.
(25:09):
That's where we we see some wrinkles in the story
because it really was the motivation to get people who
needed food more food, or was there something else behind
that move? Exactly, Matt, Exactly. So the cheese often came
from food surpluses that were stockpiled by the government as
(25:31):
part of these this huge subsidies system. Butter was also
stockpiled and then it was given under the same program.
But you don't hear a lot of people talking about
government butter doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't sound as good exactly.
So while this program it's not nefarious, it also isn't
fully altruistic. Uncle Sam is killing two birds with one
(25:54):
wheel of parmesan. Here. Yes, they are feeding the hungry,
but they're also supporting a massive, sometimes faltering dairy industry
by guaranteeing farmers will be able to sell their products
even if the actual demand does not exist. This is
exactly what Matt was talking about earlier when we kept
(26:16):
saying in theory to each other, because in theory is
not the same thing as in practice. Gentlemen, it is
time for us to share with our fellow conspiracy realists
the story of the Illuminati of cheese, which is a
real thing. Like, can we say that one more time
and Paul maybe give us a like a whatever is
a cheesy, sinister sound effect, the Illuminati of cheese perfect.
(26:46):
I thought you meant literal cheese sound effect, but well,
we'll see what Paul comes up with magic Man, what
are you talking about? We already know where Yeah, we
we paused the recording and brainstormed about this for twenty minutes. Right. So,
as we said, American consumption of cheese has skyrocketed. But
(27:10):
even that skyrocketing consumption, which was not organic, by the way,
has not been enough to meet demand because we are
grappling with a system that has been in place since
the nineteen thirties, since the Great Depression, when the federal
government bailed out America's dairy industry with all these subsidies,
(27:31):
and many people who are not in in the dairy
industry themselves are not aware of this, but those subsidies
are in effect today, and part of the knock on
consequence of this is that Uncle Sam is underwritten this
gigantic surplus of milk in the dairy industry that far
(27:53):
far exceeds the appetites of Americans like we even even
the cheesiest cheese lover in this country, like the number
one cheese eater person. Uh, if everybody was like that person,
we still would not be able to buy all the
(28:14):
milk and all the cheese that was being produced. And
when when the US government realized that there was this
huge surplus. They found themselves in a difficult political situation. Uh,
they knew that it would be and it's something we
talked about and passed off air. But you know, during
(28:37):
this time, post World War two, things like that. Uh,
they knew that they had two choices. They could remove
the subsidies, which would lead to over time a reduction
and the surplus of production, or they could find a
way to buy this to create a market that did
not exist at this level. And rural vote, the farmer vote,
(29:03):
was very, very important. So so imagine you're you're, you know,
a presidential administration. Are you going to go to these
people who voted for you and then pull the financial
rug out from under them? Yes? And I want to
give you a quick quote from a professor of agricultural
economics at Cornell University. This quote comes from a video
created by CNBC. You can check it out on YouTube,
(29:25):
I believe right now, maybe on CNBC, But this quote
is dealing with exactly that Ben. He says that at
this time in the nineteen thirties, when these subsidies first arrive, quote,
rural America presented over half of the population of Americans
and farmers presented over half of rural America. So there
(29:46):
was this sense that as a politician, as the government,
if you are helping out farmers, you are helping out
a lot of citizens slash, as you said, been voters. Yeah,
that's the thing that's and this happens a lot in
the kind of political system that the US has, Right,
you have, Uh sometimes they're vilified as being special interests, right,
(30:10):
but you have these voters and these businesses or these
institutions who have a very specific set of things they
want to see in place. And at times these forces
can be relatively a political you know, the name brand
of the political party doesn't matter as much as their actions.
(30:32):
So you know, if there's a third party called them
provolone rangers, Uh, it just gets worse, It gets worse.
Did Uh If if you have that, you know, this
other party and there their policies are, you know, not
too extreme, but one of their big things is they
(30:53):
support a subsidy that supports your industry, then you're probably
going to vote for them, you know what I mean,
or at least donate to their cause. So that's what happened. Uh,
the US made the decision to and you know, I
think a lot of historians agree it was the right
decision to enact these subsidies for the dairy industry and
other parts of US business during the Great Depression. But
(31:16):
once you open that door, it can be political suicide
to close it, to step it back, And so they continued,
they continued subsidizing this industry. And now in recent years,
the US dairy surplus has reached a record high, and
it's it's been going this way for a while. Uh.
(31:37):
The U s d A quickly realized as a result
of these subsidies, they they could not figure out what
to do with all the milk, and so the band
aid solution was, I don't know, make it cheese last
longer than milk, and that's what they did. And so
in recent years, we have, as we mentioned our listener
(31:57):
mail segment, UH with Ryan, we have as a country
generated a surplus of one point for billion with a
b pounds of cheese. And you'll see all these breathless
reports like go on YouTube and just google cheese surplus.
Colbert's got a great spot on it. Your you know,
(32:18):
your local news might have done a story on it
a few years ago. But you'll see these these breathless
comparisons because we as Americans love weird measurements. One of
the ones who found was one point four billion pounds
of cheese. That's enough to wrap around the US capital. Uh.
Nobody's saying we should consume it all. Luckily you can
(32:40):
store cheese. But even if the nation tried to eat
all of this cheese, it's less and less likely that
we could do it because that surplus is still building
despite the fact that people are consuming more cheese. Uh,
there were side effects that uh would break havoc on
(33:03):
all of us. No, it's to say that's the thing though.
It's like not not to get soapbox or anything, but
like you know, with the healthcare crisis that we have
in this country, and then you start to see that
all of this consumer culture that leads to poor health
uh and and and that this lack of preventative medicine
everything's about curing when you're already like super sick and
(33:25):
on your lound death's door. A lot of it is
like literally the fault of the government in the first place.
This whole cheese glut thing. When you really start to
drill down into it, right like like I mean, I
think we can think of probably a better like for
the for the individuals subsidized food product like granola or something,
you know, I mean, what about the grain farmers only
(33:46):
need help to But it's crazy, you guys. I just
sent a link in the chat um. I was just
googling government cheese and an eBay listing came up for
a cardboard packaging box. It's like vintage. It's like like
sixty dollars on eBay. Uh, and it says pasteurized process
American cheese donated by US Department of Agriculture for food
(34:07):
help programs, not to be sold or exchanged. It just
says it all there, and it's like, there's that's it's
literally helping the government. It's not helping the people that
need you know, better food. Well, it's like helping them
is is kind of a side effects. It's cyclical together, right, Yeah,
(34:27):
But there's there's nothing wrong with multitasking, you know. And
if you're not hurting anybody and you're satisfying two things
at once, it's it's understandable, but aren't you They are
hurting people because she's clogs your arteries if you're eating
it like for every meal, and it and it leads
to this, like I think obesity at pepademic that we
have and like you know, heart heart disease, one of
(34:48):
the unhealthiest countries in the world. And I would argue
that the government is culpable in that. And on two
separate occasions in t sixteen, first in August and then
on October uh the FEDS announced they were gonna quote
bail out dairy farmers. They were gonna purchase twenty million
dollars more worth of surplus dairy products a kh cheese
(35:11):
to distribute in food pantries and some milk as well.
As this is occurring, by the way, as this surplus
is increasing, there's a global drop in demand for dairy.
Plus there's that technology we mentioned that's making cows give
more milk, which results in the lowest milk prices since
(35:31):
the Great Recession, not depression, but Great Recession ended in
two thousand and nine. This is something we alluded to
in our listener mail segment. Farmers were literally pouring gallons
and gallons and gallons of unsold milk into holes in
the ground. Fifty million gallons. That's according to the U
(35:52):
s DA itself in in August letter Uh, the National
Milk Producers Federation asked the U. S d A for
a bailout of a hundred and fifty million dollars. This
was an ongoing, continual issue. It just kind of like
would reach a crisis point, maybe go down one step
(36:13):
and then go up two steps, down one step. It
was an incremental increase and this led to the creation
of something with a somewhat innocuous Dame Dairy Management Incorporated.
Their website is super wholesome. As wholesome as a kid
in the nineteen fifties drinking a glass of milk. Can
I just say, there's got to be a better way
to dispose of fifty million gallons of milk and pouring
(36:33):
it into a hole in the ground that's gonna be
the smelliest hole ever. I can't imagine. I can't imagine
that's going to be this So, yes, we're keeping it.
So this is it's I mean, it's true because milk
doesn't have a very long shelf life, you know what
(36:56):
I mean? And you could say, why don't we distribute
this as part of an international aid or charity thing? Um,
But if you've listened to our previous episodes on farming
in the US and across the world. You know, farmers
are often put in a very risky situation with a
(37:16):
lot of forces that are beyond their control. So it
is understandable, as strange as it sounds, that they might
be in a situation where it is literally less expensive
for them to get rid of the milk than it
is to try to transport it somewhere and pay for
the gas and pay for the storage. And Dairy Management, Inc.
(37:36):
Was set to was set to try to solve this
the They were created by something called the National Dairy
Promotion Board in the mid nineties. Here's what they do.
Their job is to act as an umbrella company for
state and local programs promoting the dairy industry. In blunt terms, folks,
(37:58):
this organization was the quasi governmental organization was explicitly created
to push as much milk, cheese, butter, and yogurt as
possible into products and into people, both in the US
and in other countries. They're the hidden hand behind what
(38:19):
appears to be rising cheese consumption. They're the group behind
Got Milk. That campaign we mentioned. Everybody remembers Got Milk
there were Uh. It started with like some normal you know, models,
commercial lactors, and then it escalated to like celebrities and
everybody would have a little little milk mustache, right, and
(38:39):
then what they're called, yes sir, that we saw in
subway stations, you saw them in billboards as television commercials.
It was absolutely ubiquitous. I mean, it's the kind of
campaign that clearly a lot, a lot, a lot of
money and marketing resources went into. Yeah, it's it was.
It was direct to your eyes and ears advertising, that's
(39:00):
what they did. And it was an era defining too.
We think of it and it like almost defines like
that period in history in our minds. It's like a
nostalgia thing at this point, right, Yeah, in a weird
way their their mind lobbyists for on the individual level
of people sitting there watching television you know which which
(39:20):
was television shows? Man think about as especially kids watching
TV shows with all of those like us, I think
our generation, I mean it is the nineties, we got
hit hard with the got Milk campaign with a lot
of the promotion of dairy products and we it and
it formed a lot in in our minds. We're gonna
(39:43):
tell you a lot of these other things that you're
going to remember, probably from your childhood and growing up,
that that this company was behind I'm gonna pause it
again here. I believe wholeheartedly that the Ninja Turtles Tell
Division show that I watched as a child had some
(40:04):
kind of behind the scenes interaction with this group to
get me to like and want pizza all the time.
I think I think they're behind it. I can't prove it.
I think you're right. And this goes to This also
goes to Ryan's original question about the origin of the
cheese powder used in mac and Cheese. Uh want a pause.
(40:26):
We've got some of our fellow listeners who are who
are gonna You're gonna meet at the end of the
episode on Twitter with their cheese punts of their own.
But I wanted to point out this excellent tweet we
got from someone who lived in Wisconsin. Uh, this is Steph,
and Steph, you said, one of my favorite things while
living in Wisconsin were the billboards that were just black
(40:47):
text on a yellow field that said cheese, no other
info needed. They knew why you were there. And that's
like that. Whenever you see those really vague this is
an important point. Whenever you see those really vague prommercials
that are not about a specific brand name or product.
They're just about a kind of thing, right Like got
(41:07):
milk is never saying, you know, go like, it's not
Greenfield pastures milk. It's just the idea of freaking milk. Exactly, yes, exactly.
If that's what's for dinner, it's what's for dinner. I
love those kind of commercials, you know, I want to
see more of them where um. You know, sometimes they're wholesome,
(41:28):
they're thing. They're like literacy movements. They're like read books.
We don't care which one. Uh so we see we
see this, and what they're What d m I is
doing at this time in the in their early days
is um, like you said, Matt, they're doing direct to
consumer advertising. They're they're playing there. They are playing literal
(41:51):
burnet style mind games. They want you to be thinking
about milk. That wants you to be thinking about cheese
and yogurt when you're in the grocery store. Dream about it,
dream about it. I really want some cheese right now.
The dairy rainbow. So I don't know why dairy rainbow
(42:11):
makes me uncomfortable, but yeah, so something happened though in
the late nine, people in this country began eating out
more often. They were going to restaurants and stuff. They
weren't cooking as often at home. So d M I
did what Corporate America calls a pivot, and they started
working with companies that sold food to people in fast
(42:36):
food joints, in restaurants and what is it called approachable
fine dining? You know in in uh in the hallowed halls,
the Chilies, and the t g I f s throughout
the nation. But what about what about them quick them
quick food places? What do you call them? The fast
food joints? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell. We
(43:00):
kid you not. They have been infiltrating. How weird is
that they have been infiltrated by t M I. Uh Like,
think about this. If you're nineties kid, you know, and
you you enjoyed book It, you enjoyed that personal pan pizza,
you probably you probably have this memory, yeah duds off
(43:22):
to crust pizza in Yeah, and specifically from maybe you
don't even remember eating it necessarily, but you certainly remember
seeing that cheese pull when and then the whole notion
of eating your pizza backwards. That was the whole impetus
behind us, and a little old guy, uh we might
have heard of named Donald Trump appeared in some of
(43:45):
those ads, um eating his pizza backwards and making it
sound like, you know, I'm Donald Trump, and I'm obviously
a smart guy, and I eat my pizza backwards because
that's just what you do, idiots. I think they cut
the part where he said it. That would have been funny,
That would have been edgy for nineties kid. But I
think you're right. Eating pizza backwards was already this new, exciting, weird,
(44:09):
cool thing. Uh. And by the end of the year,
this initiative had increased Pizza Hut sales by three million,
which sounds like a lot of money, but really it's
it's about a seven percent improvement over the previous year.
But still, think about all that extra cheese that went
(44:32):
in each one of those pizza pies. And if you
think about if you've got a stuffed crust pizza with
extra cheese, good god, d M. I is just killing
it here. Yeah, they're killing it, and they're killing you
slowly from the inside out. Greater good. If you eat
too much stuffed crust, eventually you become the stuffed crust yourself.
(44:54):
That's that's the problem. But you know, this reminds me.
I was trying to find while we're researching this um
between our listener mail and this episode, I was trying
to find this tweet that I loved from a while back.
It was someone I didn't know very well, but they
posted this this kind of explicit So Paul, please beat me. Uh.
(45:14):
Someone said, I was on a marketing call years ago
with Pete, with marketing people at Pizza Hut, and this
one guy said, we do it with what stuffed crust pizza.
No one asked us about that, We just did it.
And then the tweet ended. I think about that guy
a lot, and I love I love that idea that
(45:38):
someone is so gangster about stuffed crust. But now it
makes a little bit more sense because they had help
from the illuminati of cheese. They're not the only example. Uh,
Taco Bell is a huge example. Remember at the top,
we said the case a Loupa is going to come
into play in two thousand and twelve, a d M
I operative, we could call them that food scientists. It
(46:01):
was probably a fantastic person. We haven't spoken with her
directly named Lisa McClintock started working with the Taco Bell
product development team. Pause here for a second, Taco Bell fans,
does that not sound kind of like a dream job?
Like you go home from work and you're stressed out
(46:22):
and and your roommates or your partner, your friends are
are saying, oh, hey, what's got you down, and you're
like kicking rocks and you're like, they're just not They're
just not listening. With the burrito design, Okay, you don't
want leakage and I don't. I don't, And you're like, yeah,
you're like Samantha, they don't get my vision. Think about
(46:44):
the beauty. I mean, we've talked about it before, about
the beauty of Taco Bell and pizza. At some of
these other places, you've got a limited number of ingredients,
but anything you can do to create a new product
out of those ingredients can bring in millions and millions
of dollars. And that's like Mexican food, or at least
(47:04):
Americanized Mexican food in general, right, where like everything on
the menu is kind of a different combination of like
five or six ingredients. Taco Bell takes it to the extreme,
and you know, injects massive marketing dollars into it. Ben,
you were talking about what the case Uh what, there's
also the case Arito. Let's not forget about the case rito.
(47:27):
And when you look at it on the Taco Bell website, Um,
the cheese pouring forth from it is clearly that powdered
yellow stuff. Like there's not an ounce of actual cheese
in this. I'm I'm conjecturing it's just it's this the
wrong color. It's like this kind of weird beige yellow, pale,
odd color. When you see it pulling apart in this
(47:48):
perfectly symmetrical image. Uh, it also has just an insane
amount of saturated fat um and just more you know,
sodium than anyone should probably consume in a day. Um.
But it's absolutely true, Ben, it's genius marketing paired with
this actual conspiracy in this idea, we gotta move some
cheese units. Yeah. So Lisa McClintock started working with the
(48:13):
senior manager for product Development, Steve Gomez over Taco Bell,
and they said, we need to develop a new kind
of cheese, a new cheese filling, a new kind of cheese,
a new kind of cheese. You say, here at the
Taco Bell so, uh yeah, I'm at the food science lab,
I'm at the Taco Bell, I'm at the combination food
(48:36):
science and Taco Bell. There there's stretching and so they
want to make a stretchy cheese that that pulls like
taffy when it's heated. They want to figure out how
to mass produce it, and they want to invent some
proprietary machinery to make this. And the proprietary machinery is
really interesting, really clever. Point. So this the result of
(49:00):
this experimentation is something called the case Lupa, and I
think the case of Rito is clearly part of this too.
The case a Loupa, as you mentioned earlier, has five
times as much cheese as a basic crunchy taco. Taco
Bell had to buy four point seven million pounds of
cheese just too produce the shells. So that puts the
(49:22):
dent in that one point three billion pounds surplus. It's
weird if you read, if you read interviews with people
who are in Taco Bell management at the time, then
they will say, you know, for the longest time, we
thought cheese, sour cream stuff like that was kind of
more of a garnish or an add on to our products,
(49:43):
but now it's one of the main things beef and cheese,
So cheese use at Taco Bell since they partnered with
DMA it's increased by over twenty and that's that's why
d m I gets this strange, somewhat half sinister, half
hilarious nickname, the Illuminati of Cheese. We're gonna pause for
(50:07):
word from our sponsors. I'm wondering. I'm wondering too, and
we'll be back. We'll be back to explore some more
of unintended consequences of this again active ongoing conspiracy. Do
you guys think the Bacon Illuminati worked with Wendy's when
(50:29):
they came up with a bacon eater? D m I
definitely did. And we're back. Here's the thing. There's there's
no if and or but about it. D m I
will tell you and you speak with him that their
(50:50):
work has helped slow America's declining desire for dairy And
it's true that she demand for cheese is going like this,
and demand for milk is going like this. Uh so
do that do that for the non visual yes? So?
(51:13):
Uh if you look at a grid in your head, uh,
demand for cheese is starting at the lower left corner
and it's going all the way to the top right.
Demand for milk is starting sort of midway up your
y axis, and it's going down into the right beautiful networks. Okay,
So demand for milk has gone from thirty five pounds
(51:37):
per person in nine seventy five to fifteen pounds today.
So they've they've it's reversed. Like what was it? No,
I think, as you said, um, demand for uh, cheese
was what fourteen something? Oh yeah, that's right. In n
(51:58):
Americans were consuming fourteen pound of cheese. Then in like
essentially the modern day, it's around forty five pounds of
cheese per person per year. Milk has decreased a ton, right, Yeah,
I think it was a two close to fifty pounds
per person in nineteen and uh in um more like
one s So a significant decrease. And this is effective
(52:22):
for the a lot of the stakeholders, not counting the consumers.
Texas A and M economists did a cost benefit analysis
and in two thousand twelve they found that for every
single dollar a dairy producer invests in d M I UH,
they get two dollars and fourteen cents worth of return
(52:44):
for milk, four dollars twenty six cents worth of return
for cheese, and nine dollars in sixty three cents return
for butter. So yeah, so investing in d m I,
if you're if you're a dairy person, this is this
really helped. But of course, as we said, d m
(53:05):
I has, by nature of its mission its endeavor. They
have promoted lots of saturated fat, lots of cholesterol. Eating
cheese can add up. And for a federal agency that
is dedicated to improving overall nutrition and giving dietary guidance,
(53:26):
these partnerships can seem kind of like a contradiction, right,
Oh yeah, absolutely, And experts out there who talk about
this would completely agree with you. Ben. Uh. There's there's
a food oppression expert named Andrea Freeman who believes that
you know this, This group d m e s efforts
(53:48):
quote impose health costs on Americans generally, but disproportionately harm
low income African Americans and Latinos who live in urban
centers dominated by fast food restaurants. And we've just described
how these two giant, well now one giant chains that
(54:09):
we at least all went to when we were younger,
Like my family still eats at some of these restaurants. Um,
in these fast food chains, you can see where d
m I had large impacts at least on those brands
slash companies. And you can definitely see that. You can
see the evidence of what what Andrew Freeman is saying
(54:30):
here just in what we described with Pizza Hut and
Taco Bell. You can really see it. Yeah. And you know,
also farmers themselves aren't entirely on board with d m I,
because some will argue this primarily helps out the big guys,
the big dairy players, and not the family farms or
the smaller outfits. And that's a that's a valid criticism.
(54:52):
We see that happening with other parts of what is
called agribusiness on a high level. But either way, it
app yours. The cheesy Illuminati is real and is set
to stay. At this point, we want to pass the
torch to you folks who want to get a sense
of what you think, because there there there's a web
(55:14):
of connections. Here is this number one. A good idea
is this um. You know, some of us may argue
it's too much government intervention. Some of us may say
it's too dishonest for the public. Other people may say,
well it is overall, it's more beneficial that it is damaging.
We want to we want to hear from you. And
(55:35):
because we purposely wanted this to be to be a
lighter episode, and we promised some puns. Uh, we went
on Twitter uh and asked people if they would if
they would like to help us out with some puns.
So the tweet I put out, which is terrible, was
about to record this cheese episode. If you'd like to
(55:58):
be a part of the show, hit us up in
your favorite cheese puns in the next hour or so.
Dot dot dot This will be a guda one. Oh man, God,
I hate it. I hate Why do we do this? Anyway?
Here's here are some responses from your fellow listeners. Vaults
of x Talk, who we all know and love here
(56:19):
on the show, says, e damn, it has an eat um.
I'm assuming I can't think of any that would be
good enough for you eating cheese. No, that's not what
I meant to say. Eat Um. Is that a cheese ye? Yes? Um?
(56:41):
But then Vaults Vaults follows up with and now I'm
getting a pop up ad hot cheese singles in your area.
Thanks guys, that's great um our own O world, close
friends and colleague that you've heard on our show before.
Annie Reese Uh, one of the co creators and co
host the Amazing Saver podcast, says, unbreathlievable. You're too big
(57:07):
of a cheese to ask for my pun expertise. Now,
you munster spelled how I want to think? Yeah, cheese puns,
you monster, you relieve you're mildly cheddar than us. I
camembart being so fed up. That's funny because there were
some crossovers there between those two. Yeah, and then what
(57:28):
our buddy Nick Takowsky did a good one. I'd step up,
but I got the blues pretty bad this week. B
l e U s y and good friend of the show,
the one and only Mike Johns, who recently had a birthday.
Mike is a colleague of ours, a fantastic writer, musician,
producer here in Atlanta. Uh. He says something encouraging. He says,
(57:50):
you've got some pretty sharp followers. You chedd to get
some good suggestions here. I've got half a rind to
suggest a few, but I don't want to wedge myself
into the conversation. Wow, okay, here we go. Um, let's see,
he kept going by the way. Yeah, could we This
is one from at grape Whanger. That's a great twitter
(58:14):
named vigil um. Could we not craft less cheesy puns? Craft? No,
we can't wangerh Wow? Can we kind of jump to
Andy really quickly? Andy? He said, Ben, I believe you
have enough puns for us all but fed us safe
(58:35):
and sorry, here's a joke. What hotel do cheese lovers
stay in? The Stilton? Wonderful? My Stilton Honors Club can't
wait for that? And then uh, Steph, who we mentioned earlier,
says I'd make a joke about American cheese, but it
wouldn't age well. Shots fired, Shots fired. You can find
(58:59):
you can find more of these puns. We'd love to
hear your your favorite cheese puns or your least favorite
if you hate puns and ignored our warning and sat
through this episode. And equally importantly, we'd like to hear, um,
what what you think about these kind of things. They're
part of what's known as check off programs. We mentioned
(59:20):
this earlier. The idea is that it is so important
to have your own domestic sources of food that you
will you know, you'll go out of your way to
support them more than you may some other businesses. Oh
and uh, Jenna V. Says sweet dreams are made of cheese. Cheese.
(59:42):
Oh am, I to breathe. We gotta get out of
this the Paul. I can feel Paul growing so uh
so let us know your thoughts. We can't wait to
hear from you. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right. You can find us on the end your
net where you can also find that vintage government cheese
(01:00:03):
box that I mentioned. The listing is still live on
eBay if you're if you're down for that, um, just
search for vintage Government cheese box on eBay. I think
the bid is up to around sixty bucks. But if
you're looking for us, you can find us on Instagram
or we are conspiracy stuff show Twitter and Facebook or
were conspiracy stuff. You can also give us a telephone call.
We are one eight three three s T d W
(01:00:24):
y t K. Hit him with it, Matt, Yeah, hit
him with the rules. I was gonna hey, is there
a hey? Is there a cheese that rhymes with hey? Yes?
When you call, please tell us the name you would
like for us to refer to you as, doesn't have
to be your real name, could be a code name
like Doc Holiday or Mission Control. Super cool. Then let
(01:00:48):
us know if we can use your message on air.
That's very helpful for us. Thank you, lawyers say cheers.
Then leave your message. Please only call once per subject,
that would be very helpful as well. And if you've
got a message you want to say personally to us,
please put it right in the end. There you've got
a quick update. This justin. Uh, code named dot Holiday
(01:01:11):
adds that have our tie and grew yer are are
very high on our list. And I just I promised
her we would mention that, Oh that's important. It's important stuff.
And you call us tell us your favorite cheese is
what you know about the cheese spiracy going on here?
Whenever you're front, that's perfect, that's right, oh man. And uh,
(01:01:35):
if you don't want to do that stuff, you don't
want to leave us a message, you don't want to
find us on the internet, definitely check out the YouTube
channel conspiracy stuff over there. And if you have something
to tell us and you want to send links or
you wanna, you know, really write a lot of stuff out.
Please use our good old fashioned email address. We are
conspirat cheese at i heeart radio dot com, conspiracy at
(01:01:57):
iHeart radio dot com. Yeah, stuff they don't want you
(01:02:18):
to know. Is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
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