America Has a 1.39 Billion-Pound Cheese Surplus. How Did That Happen?

America is drowning in American cheese—and cheddar, Swiss, and other varieties, too. The country’s cheese surplus just hit 1.39 billion pounds, or as Vox puts it, enough to “arm” every man, woman, and child in the U.S. with 4.6 pounds apiece.

Our obsession with slathering everything in cheese isn’t to blame, though. U.S. dairy manufacturers have been producing too much milk for a few years now, and when there’s excess milk, it gets turned into cheese to make it last longer.

In 2014, dairy farmers started scaling up their operations in response to high demand for powdered milk from China’s growing middle class. When China’s economy started to slow a couple years later, American dairy producers were left with too many cows and too much milk. On top of that, the European Union made it more difficult for U.S. cheese producers to do business there. By 2016, the U.S. had 1.2 billion pounds of extra cheese on its hands, and since then, stockpiles have only grown.

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