Indeed. When I was a young’un, my family did not qualify for food stamps (although we should have: The local beaurocrats in charge of the decision refused to believe that a couple with a master’s degree and a most of a bachelor’s could possibly be out of work), but we did get government cheese, which we picked up at the basement of the church. My memory is that it was more like Colby, but as I said, that was long ago, so it may have been cheddar. In any event, it was very well-suited to grilled cheese sandwiches, and it wasn’t all that bad (or at least we didn’t think so… Then again, we also drank powdered milk).
Jinx, not to dogpile or junior Mod, but your comments have no place in GQ. This forum is for factual answers to factual questions. Of your post:
here is the factual part:
The rest is fodder for GD or the Pit. I’m all for trashing RR in the proper forum but post-traumatic or not your posting here was 85% wrong.
So it’s cheese with all the actual cheesiness taken out?
Jinx,
We have a Great Debates forum where you can discuss politics. You will keep politics out of General Questions. You don’t get any leeway for your troubled life. Consider yourself warned.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
We ate quite a bit of government cheese when I was a kid.
I don’t recall it being any worse than any other generic cheddar you’d find at Safeway. Though I imagine that the diary farms weren’t giving their best stuff as surplus, so the odds of getting outliers (in terms of quality) was probably much increased.
I think for most it was the stigma more than the actual quality that made us kids not want to eat it.
It appears they forgot “disgusting.”
At least in the parts of Nevada and California where I lived, that’s not exactly true. You don’t get the items directly from the government but instead get vouchers listing the items allotted. You then go to a grocery store and use the vouchers to purchase those items. So if you’re allowed two pounds of cheese on a voucher, you can get any combination of wic approved cheese that adds up to two pounds.
The actual “Government Cheese” I remember as a kid in Texas was a Velveeta type substance. God-awful on sandwiches* but is was great for nachos and macoroni & cheese.
*the sole exception being grilled cheese and grilled cheese & spam
Peace - DESK
D.E.S.K. TOP668 is correct about the vouchers. Here in Texas the grocery stores have items identified as WIC approved and I understand there are also WIC stores in some areas. At least with the vouchers there is some choice between American cheese and cheddar, but don’t expect to get Brie with your voucher.
Wow, I remember government cheese from back in the 50’s and early 60’s. It was good! Of course, that was before we knew how to “process” the hell out of it. The major problem with the surplus food program was that a lot of people didn’t know how to cook with what was offered and most of it was disgusting right out of the containers.
As more people de-learned cooking skills because of more and more processed and precooked foods being available, the complaints about the program grew. Food stamps were designed as a replacement for surplus food. People wanted the freedom to buy their own food, not be stuck with what the government wanted to feed them. There used to be a lot of restrictions on what you could buy with food stamps too. Those have been greatly relaxed over the years.
I didn’t realize that surplus food was still available today. I remember that sometime in the 60’s or 70’s there was a big push to empty warehouses of the stuff and for a while, anyone could go pick up food whereas it used to be restricted to those who qualified.
Ah, the 1980’s…
I was one of the ones who somehow escaped wealth during the Reagan years, and I ate a hell of a lot of “gub’mint cheez”
American cheese is, at best, like a very mild cheddar. The cheese program give away did use real cheese, as opposed to the truly vile, plastic-tile-like “pasturized process cheese food” which attempts to masquerade as a cheese-like food. That said, the quality would vary at times, including one memorable 5 lbs block that proved to be moldy when I got it home. It is a mark of just how dire my financial straits were at the time that, rather than toss the block, I cut away the visible mold and ate what was left.
I also took advantage of the free flour, powdered milk, and occassional cans of food marked “salvage” one could also obtain fairly easily. That, along with rice, potatoes, onions, and whatever was on the “bruised fruit and vegetable” rack at the local store comprised my diet for longer than I care to recall.
Fortunately, my financial situation has much improved over the last 20 years.
Yeah, the giveaways continue. My ex’s family was/is the regular recipient of boxes upon boxes of giveaway food. They got so much that he would give the stuff they couldn’t use to me. Since it was a mix of USDA-distributed food (with NOT TO BE SOLD OR EXCHANGED in big bold letters on the generic-but-not-the-old-school-black-on-white-generic labels), store-brand and name-brand stuff, and since my ex’s family were in the country illegally, my feeling is that it came from a local food pantry which aided with government distribution rather than directly from a government program. I’m not a big canned vegetable eater so I still have a bunch of it cluttering up my cupboards. I suppose I ought to take it to a food pantry or something.
I always heard it was Velveeta.
No it’s not – “fromage fondue” is melted cheese. I liked the second translation, though. 
The WIC program in Massachusetts works much like others have said, where you use WIC vouchers to purchase approved foodstuffs from the grocery store.
Actually, the Bodoni family is pretty well situated financially these days, and we’ll STILL cut off the visible mold from cheese and eat what’s left, unless it’s just covered with mold or the cheese has gotten too ripe for our tastes. And we’re fairly picky about what we eat, too. But cheese is made by allowing milk to rot and infecting it with selected molds.
Now, I WILL throw away a whole loaf of bread if there’s a spot of mold bigger than about a quarter on it. I figure the mold spores are all through the bread.
Trust me, this was MOLDY cheese. I wound up with little mold-free chunks, less than half the block. Maybe I should have said I cut the mold-free cheese off the rest.
It wasn’t really a happy time for me, foodwise.
During my homeless days in NYC, I once took a box of government cheese out of the garbage, cut off the moldy parts, and ate the rest with a box of saltines I bought with a dollar I had found. It was okay, and great to have that much food in my stomach.
I think the cheese was in the government’s warehouse because of an old idea, based on an even older idea as the cite below points out, that originated in 1936-37 during the Great Depressions. It was promoted by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace and was known as the ever-normal granary.
The idea was that a buffer, a sort of “surge tank,” could be used to smooth out the wild fluctuations of farmers’ incomes because of swings in the price of commodities. During good-weather years with overproduction the government would buy the surplus to keep prices up and during bad-weather years sell those accumulated surpluses to keep prices down. Bad crop growing years were very much on everyone’s mind at the time because along with the depression there were several years of severe drought in the Midwest. The futures market in commodities has somewhat the same effect without the formal, organized goal of stabilizing prices.
While I can’t directly respond to the OP, I’m grateful for these small moments when some of my real-life experiences can add to discussions already in progress. Since very little here at the SDMB has to do with Oracle programming or Warhammer 40,000, I love to help out when it comes to things that involve grocery stores - especially those in Texas.
When I worked for Albertsons all those years ago, we did a fairly brisk trade in WIC-approved items. The system is as D.E.S.K.Top668 describes it: families particpating in the WIC program could periodically get vouchers for certain “essentials;” I personally saw and handled vouchers for cereal, milk, eggs, cheese, beans, and even baby formula.
In that time (c. 1990-1994), each voucher had both a list of acceptable brands to choose from and a maximum price threshold. In addition, they were only good on or after a specified date. Furthermore, the bearer was required to choose only one brand for some items, and might even be restricted to what size containers (i.e. “six eight-ounce cans OR two twenty-four-ounce cans” for example) he could select.
The vouchers worked more like a blank check from the government than food stamps. Each one was filled in with the amount, stamped with a special imprint, and signed by both the cashier and the customer. The customer got his product and Albertsons was reimbursed for the merchandise.
Government dairy subsidies were started in the 1930s when the interstate transportation of milk was not practical. Knowing that it was important that school-age children should have milk in their daily diets, the federal government encouraged the widespread production of milk by offering subsidies to dairy farmers throughout America. The amount of the subsidies was based on the producer’s distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which at the time was at the heart of America’s dairyland. (Thus, Wisconsin dairy farmers oppose dairy subsidies, as they get the raw end of the deal.)