Big Cheese

Dispatch

In the limestone caves beneath Springfield, Missouri, lies the Fort Knox of American cheese.

The conspiracy theorists are right: America’s cheese reserves include over a billion pounds of dairy products.

I gaze upon the wealth of cheese with my own eyes, though it is no longer owned by the US government.

Many of America’s stainless-steel tanks, like those that bring raw milk from farms to processors, and pasteurized milk from processors to production plants, are manufactured in Springfield, Missouri. Across town from Stainless Fabrication Inc, I discovered the Fort Knox of American Cheese, located deep beneath the ground at the armpit of two industrial roads east of downtown. From my rental car, I watch tractor trailers through binoculars as they ease into an archway and down a ramp blasted into the limestone bedrock on one side of the intersection; on the other, a freight train loaded with six refrigerated cars from the Kraft Heinz cheese plant across town makes its way into another entrance. In one of the rail’s subterranean unloading bays, carved into gray-green rock and built back up with concrete, I observe forklift operators as they shimmy enormous barrels of cheese through the warehouse doorway. I have successfully infiltrated the Springfield Underground, a …

Report

Delray Beach, America’s Rehab Capital

It is impossible to grow up in America without repeated exposure to cripplingly addictive drugs

The Florida Shuffle ain’t what it used to be

Do you have a lighter?

By Noah Rawlings

Florida looked as you imagine. A seagull jerked its reptilian eyes around an axis of scrawny neck: noon, ten o’clock, three o’clock, noon. It squeaked and whined to the air, which was 75 degrees Fahrenheit; and to the water, which was a charming turquoise; and to the sky, which of course was azure; and to the trees, which, naturally, were palms with trembling fronds; and to the girls, who lay on their stomachs in, indeed, bikinis, reading thin paperbacks; and to the man, whose hair was the white of retirement age. The man sat in a blue polyester folding chair, a few yards from the girls. He faced not the ocean but down the endless beach to the south, where the sun lay. The sun made the man’s fat silver wristwatch and gold baptism chain glitter, and it made knives dance on his sunglasses, and it deepened the caramel of his skin. “Ladies,” he called over, his voice tight and gritty with a lilt from Queens, or perhaps Long Island. “Do you mind if I play my radio? I won’t make it loud.” …

Big Cheese

Critic's Corner

Delray Beach, America’s Rehab Capital