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I lost hope for any kind of sense or neatness in economics the day I learned about the American cheese vaults.

The WHAT!? @derinthescarletpescatarian WHAT DO YOU MEAN CHEESE VAULT

It goes like this:

- Dairy industry in trouble due to a lack of demand for their products. Dairy industry is full off important voters and political backers and want to support a government that protects their industry.

- Government creates massive subsidies and handouts for dairy industry. Now the dairy industry can sell milk cheaper, and it doesn’t matter that they’re producing way too much. Hooray!

- There’s still way more milk than people can drink. They don’t want to throw it out; they want money for it. Excess milk is stored; it’s more cost and space effective to store it as cheese, so most of it becomes cheese.

- Government promotes health campaigns centred on the benefits of milk to increase dairy purchasing. Pays for health studies that say milk is good. Buys milk and cheese from dairy industry and gives it out in government welfare programs, school lunch programs, etc.; it doesn’t matter, so long as the dairy industry is getting paid for all this milk and cheese that no one wanted. But it’s not enough. Government starts introducing incentives and tax breaks and soforth to encourage food manufacturers to put more milk and cheese in their products, just to get it sold.

- This is theoretically sustainable, except that the government has to support continued growth of the dairy industry and their profits to keep securing their votes. There is so much milk being produced. Furthermore, public tastes are changing; due to other government- and industry-directed health campaigns promoting other industries, people want nutritious milk but not fat; they buy skim milk. The fat pulled from skim milk goes to make more cheese that nobody wants, because people want fancy foreign cheeses that feel somehow healthier (for-profit health industries all push a uniform message that cheap food is probably bad for you). Theairy industry needs to be supported still, so the government buys up more excess cheese. It’s good to have *some* excess cheese, in case there’s a disaster or embargo or some other break in production.

- The government supports the dairy industry by buying more cheese.

- The dairy industry needs more subsidies to grow. There’s an election soon. It’s important to Support American Job Creators. They’re subsidised, They also have some more cheese that they’d like to sell the government, if they want.

- The Government buys more cheese.

- There are many warehouses full of cheese. These are referred to as the “cheese vualt”. The storage of cheese has once again become a big logistical problem for the government. Any day now, a report will come out telling us that eating large volumes of cheese might protect you from the coronavirus, and just in case, the government is giving very cheap cheese to everyone with an EBT card. All Hail Cheese.

And no, it isn’t just cheese. This is why everything is full of corn syrup, too. This is what determines what your house is made from and where roads are going to be built and how closely the safety of your drinking water is monitored. And about weapons. The military-industrial complex is partly about bullying other countries for oil, but it’s mostly about propping up a wobbly jenga tower of military weapons and vehicle producers who offload their rapidly outdated equipment through the police force. (Which is why there’s such violent opposition to reducing funding for the massively overfunded police force – it’s the major drain on the overstuffed “cheese vault” of military hardware. The point of equipping American cops in that absurd nonsense and loosing them on innocent civillians isn’t about equipping the cops, it’s about offloading the equipment. The loss of civillian lives is considered an acceptable cost for supporting the infinite growth of the weapons production industries.)

What

And I can’t steess this enough

The FUCK?!

And before someone comes in like “tHiS iS aN aMeRicAn tHinG” Canada has a maple syrup vault for the same reason and a while back there was a fucking maple syrup heist

Exactly yes! And then there is the other part of this process:

When an industry like the Dairy Industry (or corn syrup, or cars, or soy, or chicken etc) gets so unnaturally immense, it has inevitably done so by cutting corners and employing damaging and immoral practices that no small dairy producer would ever consider.

But there isn’t any one person in charge to carry the full responsibility of these practices… there is just a few boards made of business tycoons who don’t live on a farm, don’t interact with the daily operations, and can get fired if the dairy industry doesn’t make even more profit this quarter than it did last quarter. Below them is just a massive pyramid of human machinery that will be fired and replaced if they don’t do as they are told. In the case of independent providers, such as corn farmers for the corn syrup industry, the subsidies are structured to keep them vulnerable, which is why many corn farmers in the U.S. have to have a second job to survive. Small dairy farmers (and other independent provider networks) are also at the mercy of this kind of system. In California dairy is one of the largest and most profitable industries, contributing 57 billion to the state’s economy in 2018, yet ~somehow~ independent dairy farmers struggle to make a living.

So the only hope is for some dairy farmers to start their own diary company, one which addresses the immoral and damaging practices employed by the conglomerates. Surely the public would support a growing company that cares about these things. 

And the public does! We are even provably willing to spend additional money on products that address these issues whenever we can afford to do so, and we’ll vote to regulate the industry whenever we’re properly informed and given the option. So the dairy conglomerates, who have an army of lobbyists for this purpose, pay for some media about milk pasteurization (pasteurization is kind of like sterilization) and then send their lobbyists to the government.

They say to the government officials “hey, here are some new, way more intensive pasteurization techniques. If you make these legally required, the public will like you and we’ll give you money for your re-election campaign.”

So it becomes law. The public is happy to see a politician enforcing regulation for Big Business, and Big Business sees that the politician will do what they want.

But the old pasteurization process was never an actual problem (and there are many real problems that need to be addressed). This new process doesn’t accomplish any necessary change, but it does boil away a lot more milk, and it requires high-tech machinery that costs millions of dollars.

The dairy conglomerates are already producing more milk than they can easily sell, and they are making billions in profits, they can afford to buy multi-million dollar machinery that burns up product.

But smaller competing companies can’t.

There is now way. Big industry does this with paperwork and certification and safety regulation and all kinds of things – perversions of regulations we actually want, which is what makes it so hard, because we DO want safety regulation, we DO want sustainability initiatives, etc.

“oh dear,” says Milk Conglomerate the following year “we clearly can’t afford to address these problematic practices or we’ll go out of business – just look at what happened to Smaller Dairy Company last year. And the poor dairy farmers are barely getting by! If only government would stop over-regulating us, smh. Honestly it’s gotten so bad for the dairy industry that we’re probably going to need a tax break, which will totally help the independent dairy farmers somehow, we promise.”

And then at the next board meeting someone says “hey, did you notice that a bunch of people are willing to pay a lot more money for milk products if you put things like “ethically sourced” on the packaging? Let’s lobby to be able to legally say those things without changing anything about our production process, and then sell some of our stuff under a new brand called “Farmer Dan’s Green Dairy for Happy Cows” It will look like a different company, but it will actually be the same product for more money :)

And that’s why you might see this

on the shelf right next to this

even though they are both owned by the mega corporation General Mills.

See how they’ve packaged it to look like a small independent producer, and they’ve used “homegrown” as part of the name so they can use that buzzword even on products where there is nothing to “homegrow” Meanwhile, they will move behind the scenes to destroy any smaller companies that try to actually care about things like sourcing responsibly and operating ethically etc.

See this?

This brand is owned by Hershey.

“Inspired Chocolate Empowering Women”? Hershey sources up to 80% of its chocolate from plantations that run on literal child slavery.

These companies dump so much money into those plantations that the number of child slaves on chocolate plantations has nearly doubled over the last ten years, contributing to kidnappings and human trafficking. Pressured to change, they instead lobby to tweak the legal definitions of things like “fair trade” in their favor, and block competing companies, in part by using up all the market space for alternatives through products like the one pictured above. They can put it out cheaper than smaller companies because the child slavery chocolate has already paid for all their processing and shipping lines. They’ve been promising congress for over a decade that they will think about changing their sourcing, and congress has been, like, well, as long as you’re thinking about it. California took them to court over it, but somehow didn’t win the case? It’s horrifying what these corporate giants are involved in, what they get away with, and they’ll put it on the customer every time, as if they aren’t manipulating our every attempt to give the public the opportunity to support alternatives.

This is already an extremely long post but whenever you see a fast food chain come out with some limited time cheesy mcfuckburger it’s because they’re getting a tax writeoff in exchange for pushing cheese

06 February 2021   ♦   89,963 notes
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