I consider myself the SDMB resident expert in all 3 of those areas, me bucko.
Based on the experience of my wife’s aunt a lot of these blocks were cut up and distributed or traded with others.
Nothing is better than black market gubment cheese…well maybe escaped felon sex.
Back in the late 90s I was working for a food distribution company [US Foodservice, since I had an excellent work experience with them I don’t mind if I take a google hit for mentioning them] I worked distributing the USDA food commodities and at one point I got a chance to sample a whole bunch of the products, and I would occasionally have to go into the warehouse and saw the products. Yes, government cheese exists, and is in a 5 pound brick - it comes in a chedder-oid and a mozzarella-ish form - I had to send out shipments to a processing company that would send it back as shredded or sliced repackaged for the end agency. Some agencies requested the cheese to be transshipped to a processing plant to get turned into pizza, lasagne or the individual wrapped slices of chedder-oid to be turned into cold or grilled sandwiches at the end agency. I will also say that the chips[crisps], fruit cups, individually wrapped baked goods [muffins and snack cakes] were frequently the regular commercial stuff rewrapped into generic non-brand name wrappers, and stuff like chicken nuggets, french fries and the like were simply the standard commercial food service packaging and ended up in the USDA system as a donation from Con-Agra or whichever huge corporation was using the donation as a tax write off/payment in kind of taxes. Government honey and other government foods are frequently a ‘payment in kind’ situation
I loved Government Cheese! I still have their album on cassette; my favorite song is Yellow Cling Peaches.
Two people, and seemingly forever. I was about 7 or 8 at the time, so some details have faded. It was ever present in the fridge though.
My mom got Government BEEF from the school she worked at. It made great chop suey.
I got mine in the city of Chicago, which is most assuredly NOT rural, and isn’t Illinois a blue state…?
As a single person I got one 5lb block a month. Took me about 3 weeks to go through it, 4 if I was being really careful to ration it. But then, I eat cheese in my breakfast every day, and given my lack of income would eat it later in the day as well a lot of the time.
Panera Bread distributes day old bread and baked goods at our church.
My school received government cheese. It made the best grilled cheese and cheese toast. I’m willing to bet that our peanut butter and honey were also government commodities. We always had peanut butter and honey rather than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
With 4 kids, a block of cheese went quick. I think they distributed food 2x per month. You might not get cheese each time. Later, when I was in Boy Scouts, the camp got lots of government food. I think it was almost all from the government. One thing, we were there for a two week encampment, and the water was very hard. For some reason, the leaders decided that we all had to eat prunes. The prunes came in cans, maybe 2 gallons in size. We all ate prunes once. The scoutmaster decided he didn’t want 30 kids crapping like geese.
Anyone who received Social Security was eligible to get cheese, honey, powdered milk, butter, and whatever else they decided to give out, and my grandmothers both took advantage of it even though neither of them really needed it. Because it was more than they could possibly use, they passed some of it on to my parents, who in turn even gave some of that cheese to me. It was great for cooking, although not so much for eating straight.
My paternal grandmother would usually be first in line when the office opened up; they didn’t have any of that when she was raising 4 kids on her own in the early 1950s after she threw the sperm donor out.
In the time between when I finished college and started grad school (mid-80s), I was pretty down-and-out. I remember participating in a community service project called Fair Share, where in return for a few hours volunteer work each week I’d get a box full of groceries. A big brick of government cheese was always included. Not the best I’ve ever had, but not bad either.
Now that I think about it, the cheese served on sandwiches at the McDonald’s in Moscow when it first opened tasted exactly the same. I was told it was trucked in from Germany; who knows?
Yeah, when I was a little tyke in the 80s, my great-grandparents would sometimes babysit me, and take me to their “senior citizens center” (club for old folks) and they would pick up commodities like those 5 pound blocks of cheese. Seemed to be given out whether you needed it or not. Anywho, I concur–they made darned fine grilled cheese sandwiches or macaroni cheese.
As far as “day-old bread,” a weird interim duty I had in the Navy in Florida (late '90s) was sorting and passing out such from bakeries to orgs helping needy folk every day. God only knows why we were in charge of that, but whatever. We were given carte blanche to snack on whatever we liked…there was sooo much every day. I gained like 20 lbs that first month, I kid you not. Good lord. Croissants, danishes, bagels, baguettes…
We used to have it in the fridge (I’m not entirely sure where it came from) and I recall liking it. But as a kid the only thing I had to compare it to was Kraft Singles, so… I can definitively say it was better than Kraft Singles.
Remember that Kraft Singles aren’t real cheese. 
There was a Culinary Union Strike in Las Vegas that most of the casino workers were part of back in 1983. That was my first introduction to gubmint cheese. Both parents were on strike and were earning a combined $80 in union wages to picket their respective casinos. I would come home from 6th grade and make myself a short stack of grilled cheese, except they weren’t grilled, they were microwaved. :smack:
Probably not the smartest way to make a melted cheese sandwich and I’m pretty sure it contributed to the adolescent puberty gain that I experienced in that time period…(cheesy boobs and butt, ;))
I think that program still existed in the early 1990s, when I was in college. Several of my friends participated in that, but they never went back a second time because they said the food they got wasn’t very good.