Question 8
Read the following passage and answer the given subquestions.
During the Depression, when milk supply exceeded demand, the US government bought milk to keep its price stable and support dairy farmers. Then, trying to find a way to store or get rid of the surplus, it started stockpiling cheese, which lasts longer than milk. The government bought so much cheese that it eventually filled every cold storage in the country. But there was still more excess milk. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) rented half an acre in a Kansas cave and filled it floor to ceiling with blocks of cheese. At its height, the US had 2lbs of stored cheese for every resident. Eventually, the USDA turned to its nutrition programs to dispose of excess cheese. Despite most Indigenous peoples’ inability to digest milk, commodity cheese became the centerpiece of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Musician Wade Fernandez, a member of the Menominee nation, sings Commodity Cheese Blues, lamenting, “I went downtown to the commod shop / Met the blues ’cause they were out of stock. Tell me please when I’ll get my commod cheese.” Nicknamed “pasteurized gold”, the bright orange cheese bricks sometimes operate as currency to buy other foods or goods. The irony of this treasure is not lost on critics. In 2006, an Indian Country Today article observed: “Some Lakota still say to this day that the only brick of gold the Lakota people got out of the Black Hills is the brick of cheese rationed out on commodity day.” Funneling surplus cheese into nutrition programs like FDPIR and school lunches was not enough to save the dairy industry, which accounts for 3.5% of the US gross domestic product – half a percentage more than the auto industry. President Jimmy Carter vowed to increase the price of milk by six cents a gallon in 1977 and committed to buying as much dairy as necessary to prop up the industry. When government-purchased cheese began to mold, the plan to get it out of storage became urgent. In 1981, a USDA official told the Washington Post: “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible ... Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.” Instead, President Reagan’s administration came up with a way to solve the problem without affecting the demand for or price of cheese. It created the Dairy Distribution Program, sending truckloads of cheese blocks to poor neighborhoods around the country. Inevitably, government cheese entered popular culture as a marker of poverty.
What did the Indian Country Today article observe about the cheese?
It was a high-quality product
It was seen as a valuable commodity
It was considered a valuable resource in exchange for gold
It was a disappointing substitute for gold