America might not have a budget surplus, but we have something even more exciting — a cheese surplus. Somehow, cheese enthusiasts have found themselves in an ideal situation: supply is exceeding demand. The surplus just hit 1.39 billion pounds, which is probably enough to top our pizzas through 2025.
The reason for the surplus? For a few years now, US dairy manufacturers have been producing too much milk, and excess milk gets turned into cheese to make it last longer. In 2014, dairy farmers scaled up their operations in response to high demand for powdered milk from China, and when China’s economy started to slow, American dairy producers were left with too much milk. The European Union has also made it more difficult for US cheese producers to do business abroad, so by 2016, the US had 1.2 billion pounds of extra cheese domestically.
