Now that I have your attention, I'd like to take this opportunity of winning the ListServ to focus on the very important topic of Government Cheese, specifically the giant rectangular blocks of US subsidy cheesefood distributed in the 1980s.
Growing up, I didn't comprehend for many years that we were poor. Perhaps not until paying for reduced lunch in school did I understand our poverty. Reduced lunch was a quarter instead of $1.50, and it meant holding up the lunch line while some woman in a hair-net would ask my name, and then slowly check it off a list as if she hadn't seen me every day, or wasn't quite sure where W was in the alphabet. I always felt this 'service' of reduced lunch was a conspiracy in public humiliation. You couldn't make lunch for less than a quarter, not even in the 80s. I stopped eating lunch in the 4th grade.
With poverty came the reality that, although the spiral perm that mom gave me in the kitchen wasn't noticeably a "home perm", I still would never be cool because my hi-tops were not BK, LA-Gear, or Reebok, but shoes we got at the Champion discount outlet. What we did have, my family as well as other fiscally challenged Americans, was Government Cheese, glorious government cheese. For those that didn't qualify to receive this delight, well I feel sorry for you. I would gladly again entertain the idea of hotdog water as a soup base (my brother swears this happened; mom denies it) if it allowed me to have another Gub'ment cheese sandwich to accompany that meal.
Some Background: Before we had socialized healthcare, we had Reagan's socialized cheese. To standardize dairy prices the US Government had stockpiles of dairy surplus in the form of butter and processed cheesestuff. The yellowy-orange American cheesefood product was mass produced and said to have contained a scrappy mixture of various different cheeses, emulsifiers, and preservatives. In the 1980's stockpiles of dairy surplus got so large that the cheese supply was in danger of spoilage, so the Reagan administration decided to distribute free processed cheese to the nation's needy families. Apparently the subsidy program that funded cheese and butter blocks ended in the 90's.
To tell you that government cheese was delicious would be an understatement. As an adult, I've eaten at a number of renowned restaurants including the French Laundry where I dined on truffle mac and cheese made from the milk of a single cow and sprinkled with a trio of tasting salts from the time of the dinosaurs. Thomas Keller's posh-mac was good, but if given the choice between pretentious macaroni or a plain-ass poverty sandwich, I'd take the nostalgia sandwich. Most seem to agree that it was most like Colby.....which I'm not too sure about.
In many ways, I feel like this historical poverty symbol, government cheese, can easily stand as a metaphor for my tough childhood, scrappy, and uninviting to the onlookers, but rich and satisfying on the inside. My single mom often worked 3 jobs, but we had a very good life.
If anyone here on the listserv has any connections to what was then this USDA cheesestuff, I would gladly pay the black-market, back-alley, crack-den, dark-web price to once again experience the power of Government Cheese. Please contact me.
Much Love,
C-Dubs from the cheese block
[email protected]
Gilbert, Arizona
Disclaimer - Please note that I have in no way intended to offend any Zombie Nazi Vampire Werewolf Shark Octopus Hookers, for I have nothing but the utmost respect for them.