You thought the US cheese surplus was huge? The US has a 2.5 billion-pound surplus of meat

According to the USDA, American meat producers now have 2.5 billion pounds of chicken, turkey, pork, and beef in cold storage, and producers are running out of warehouse space to store it all.

BRIAN RESNICK: ‘US dairy producers now have a 1.39 billion-pound surplus of cheese, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture. As the Washington Post has noted, that’s the largest domestic reserve of cheddar, Swiss, American, and other cheese varieties on record. It means there’s enough excess cheese to arm each American citizen with a hefty 4.6 pounds…

A similar glut exists for the meat industry. According to new data from the USDA, American meat producers now have 2.5 billion pounds of chicken, turkey, pork, and beef in cold storage, which is also a record, according to the Wall Street Journal. And producers are running out of warehouse space to store it all…

What does more than a billion pounds of cheese even look like? What does 2.5 billion pounds of meat look like? Extrapolating from the density of this popular brand of cheddar, 1.39 billion pounds of cheese would take up roughly 900,303 cubic yards. That’s a mountain of cheese, comparable to the size of the US Capitol building… Impressive. How about the meat? For that, we need to make a few more assumptions. Let’s say all the meat — the combined poultry, beef, and pork — is ground down into patties… Here’s what it would look like, with the cheese surplus melted on top’. SOURCE…