On The Non-Existence Of Cheese

It is hard to believe in this day and age of instantaneous worldwide communications and travel that credence is still given to that hoary old myth of cheese. However, recent developments, particularly on the web, have forced me once again to turn my attentions to a sound refutation of this particularly foolish piece of New Age drivel.

Cheese, it is said, is made from milk and a bizarre substance known as rennet, which is supposed to be made from the insides of a cow's stomach - a likely story! - however, it seems that the rennet is not actually necessary, since some of the cheese myths talk of a kind of "vegetarian cheese" which is rennet-free. One rather wishes that the propagators of the myth would make their minds up once and for all about the rennet issue - either it is necessary or it isn't. Nevertheless, since there is no more evidence for the existence of rennet than there is for that of cheese itself, the whole thing is somewhat academic.

So-called cheese experts make a wide variety of claims for the existence of a wide variety of cheeses, but they have yet to come up with a rigorous proof of the existence of cheese itself. Sadly, this is, in itself, insufficient material from which to conclude that there is definitively no such thing as cheese, but in the following paragraphs, I shall provide what I believe is indeed a full and final demonstration that cheese not only does not exist, but is in fact a logical impossibility.

It would be very tedious of me to attempt to debunk each and every one of the reported cheese sightings that have proliferated since the so-called Gorgonzola Incident of 1947, but a couple of examples will suffice:

Mr T., a well known children's television presenter in the UK, telephoned me only last Thursday in a state of great excitement, saying that he had found a small disc-shaped object in his fridge that he was convinced was what he described, in his ignorance, as a Camembert. Unfortunately, I was busy that evening, and also over the weekend, but when I finally made it over to his place the following Monday and had the chance to examine his fridge, I could find no trace of the object he had described.

I did, however, find several tabs of LSD, which led me to the not unnatural conclusion that the whole disc-shaped object affair had been nothing more than a drug-induced hallucination, which I pointed out to Mr T. in no uncertain terms. It was at this juncture that Mrs T. entered the house, which I took as my cue to leave, since she and I do not see eye to eye on a number of issues, particularly the cheese myth, over which she and I have nearly come to blows on a number of occasions.

Miss F., a junior researcher at the House of Commons with whom I lunch on a semi-regular basis, suffers from a similiar streak of New Age optimism, and in her efforts to prove to me that there is indeed such a thing as cheese, invited me only last week to what she in her flippant way described as a "cheese and wine party."

I was sadly delayed on my way to the party, and when I finally arrived, I found a great deal of wine, but, of course, absolutely no cheese at all. Everyone there was very drunk, to which I attributed the uniformity with which the attendees swore that there had indeed been cheese at the party earlier, and that the reason there was no more was that they had "eaten it." Such a ridiculous assertion is not worthy of the bother of a refutation.

Figure 1

However, I have yet to prove the logical impossibility of cheese itself. In order to do so, it is necessary for us to define our terms. "Cheese" is defined as the alleged result of processing milk, a substance whose existence, though considered dubious by some, is at least reasonably well documented. Assume for the sake of argument that milk does indeed exist (though the notion that it is in fact produced by cows is obviously laughable), and that it may be found, in liquid form, in a wide variety of containers of different shapes. Some of these containers, colloquially referred to by laymen as "bottles", are clearly easy to rotate about an axis perpendicular to the base of the milk. (see Fig. 1)

Figure 2

Let us further suppose that a number of putative "bottles of milk" prepared in this way be placed at the top end of an inclined plane, as shown in Fig. 2.

If these bottles of milk were to be released from the top of the plane, they would be acted upon by the force of gravity, and to cut a long and tedious story short, would roll downwards, thus producing rotation in both bottles and milk.

If the theories of the so-called "cheese experts" were correct, one would expect the bottles to contain not milk but cheese, once they had rolled far enough down the plane. However, as any fool within striking distance of a dairy and a hillside can demonstrate to their own satisfaction, this simply does not occur. The result of rolling milk bottles down a hill is not cheese, merely reduced-altitude milk. If the very process by which the substance is supposed to be produced can be so clearly demonstrated to be a falsehood and a sham, one is forced to conclude the same of the substance itself.

I have said it before, and I fear I may yet have to say it again. Cheese simply does not exist. It is a fantasy, a sham, a lie and a chimera. There is no such thing, nor has there ever been. It is ridiculous to suppose otherwise.