I don't care to discuss the topic of breads and meats - these can be locally sourced at variable levels and in food deserts not at all. America has, inarguably, a disproportionate imbalance of access to these things.
Real cheese? Cheese I will tell you right now is something America has a lot of. Too much of.
For starters, we'll look at revenue. The dollar is fake but we're stuck playing by its rules, and as a result if we look at it within its rules, the market size revenue of the dairy product production industry (cheeses, yogurts, milk) was estimated at $
163,000,000,000 in 2022. For comparison, U.S. hospitals and the entire drug, cosmetic, and toiletry industries (over-the-counter medicines, skin creams, tampons - these are all lumped together as general pharmaceuticals) combined made an estimated $1,800,000,000 in 2023. In the span of a year amidst the vaxx boom, Big Pharma made
11% the yearly revenue of Big Dairy.
That is too incomprehensibly large a number to spoof when it is also confirmed 41% (heh) land in the United States is used for raising cows. How much of those cows do we eat? Harder to determine due to our distribution for meat not being incentivized the same way dairy products are.
That's my next point - incentivization of production. The United States Government specifically incentivizes, rewards, and aids anyone attempting to produce dairy products, especially cheese. This is done through grants and subsidies among other things, as part of a plan established back in the post-Depression era to make sure Americans would not potentially starve to death, as cheese is theoretically easy to produce and maintain. As a result of consumer preference, there was a rise in demands for different cheeses - which were all still incentivized, and combine that with the growing melting pot as Europeans left their ruinous home countries in hopes of having roofs over their heads after the second World War and this resulted in grassroots production of authentic European cheeses with "home country" recipes. Munster, gouda, parmigiano, you name it. This was further augmented by, of all people, Reagan with the Agriculture and Food Act of 1981 which specifically kicked the process into overdrive.
So we have cheese that is incentivized to be made, in different styles as pushed by consumers, in supply by immigrants seeking business in the U.S. going for what can immediately cover them through grants in sbusidies. This means a lot of cheese is being made? How much cheese is being made?
More than we can fucking eat. At any point a standing president can give the order and every American man, woman, and child can be supplied effectively 2lbs of cheese every day for a
year and still have enough of a reserve to prevent a total stoppage and ruin exports (And yes, we have so much that we export a lot of excess purely because we don't have space).
And that's the last point, space. We have physical evidence of access to real cheese via the fact we have so goddamn much we don't know where to put it in what would be described as "reasonable capacity." Instead, we store our
billions of pounds of cheese in climate-controlled cave systems. The largest is the "Missouri Cheese Caves," also known as the Springfield Underground, which not only can you look up, you can sign up to tour around in!
See all those pallets wrapped up tightly? Those hold cheese by the hundreds of pounds. There are several tons of cheese in this image alone, and this is just a fraction of the real estate underground.
Now, of course, there's the counterpoint of "Then why do we have cheese product!?"
Cheese product is literally that... it's a product of cheese. We have so goddamn much that even with exports, even with storing most of it underground, we still don't have enough space for the excess. So what the dairy industry does is melt that shit down and mix and emulsify it into a singular product - it's still cheese, it's just mixes of cheese, usually cheddar and mozzarella. Some add in fat specifically for culinary purposes. But it's the minority of all the goddamn cheese we have.
But why do we have so much goddamn cheese, aside from these factors?
Because in spite of the negrification of the United States, it's still ultimately a country built off of Anglo-Teutonic philosophy and culture, and the only thing more Anglo-Teutonic than schizophrenia and fursonas is cheese.
