Moon as Cheese: The Myth and Science

The moon is made of cheese. It’s a trope that shows up in children’s books, television and other popular media. Wallace and Gromit went up to the moon for cheese in the 1989 film A Grand Day Out . In 2023, one of the villains of the television show Superkitties tried to hijack a rocket ship to find cheese on the moon. There was even a DC comic book character named Chester Cheese in the 1980s who was a superhero, Little Cheese, who got his powers by eating “Lunar Longhorn,” a cheese found on the moon.

In March 2025, bestselling and award-winning science fiction author John Scalzi published When the Moon Meets Your Eye that actually imagines what would happen if the moon suddenly became cheese.

Then there is food inspired by the trope: A snack food called Moon Cheese that prides itself as being full of protein and recent cheesemaker Ron Henningfeld of Hill Valley Dairy made a cheese named Luna in 2020 with the description starting, “If the moon is made of cheese, we think it would taste like Luna.” It’s cave-aged with a natural rind and described as an alpine/gouda hybrid.

So where does this trope come from and why has it retained such cultural currency?

Origins of the Myth

The origin of the idea that the moon is cheese is older than you’d think. The earliest written record is from the English writer John Heywood, “The moone is made of a greene cheese” is mentioned in his 1546 Proverbs. Part ii. Chap. vii. Scholars have interpreted that the word green does not refer to green moldy cheese, but rather a new cheese. (Heywood is better known for proverbs like “Haste maketh waste” and “When the iron is hot, strike.”)

A common answer across the internet is that the idea came from a “medieval Slavic fable” about a fox and wolf, but none of the articles about the fable name an author or an actual source for the claim. Jean de La Fontaine wrote “The Wolf and the Fox in the Well” in 1678 where a fox sees the moon in the reflection in a well and thinks it is cheese. He leaps into the well, lands on one of two pails to draw water, and realizes that he has made a mistake. He eventually convinces a passing wolf by saying, “It is an exquisite cheese, made by Faunus from milk of the heifer Io.” The greedy wolf jumps in, and the fox is able to escape.

A more recent explanation also comes from the French. K.C. Hysmith, Ph.D., a food scholar, noted that her French professors said that the moon is cheese idea came from Georges Méliès’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) that famously depicts a rocket ship sticking out of the face of the moon, which is also gooey and squishy, much like some cheeses.

Interestingly, there was a large cheese called Luna in Ancient Rome. According to Patrick McGuigan’s The Philosophy of Cheese, the Roman author and naturalist Gaius Plinius Secundus (known as Pliny the Elder) referenced the cheese in The Natural History: “from the frontiers of Etruria and Liguria those of Luna, remarkable for their vast size, a single cheese weighing as much as a thousand pounds.” Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (or Martial) noted that the cheese had an image dedicated to the goddess Luna on it. While there’s not much more information about the cheese, clearly the Ancient Romans associated cheese and the moon to a certain extent.

Hysmith points out that the moon is universal: “No matter where you are on Earth, you see the Moon.” Cheese (or some kind of fermented milk product) is also something that is fairly universal to many cultures. “Everyone knows roughly how it's made, and roughly what it looks like,” Hysmith said, “As a scholar, that's where I think of how this is still so relevant, and it applies to kids shows, books, and TV references around the world.”

John Scalzi credits the myth of moon cheese continuing because of children’s media. “Kids know what cheese is. They eat mac and cheese their entire life. Some kids eat nothing but mac and cheese,” he adds, “It's a thing that they engage with. I think that's one of the reasons why it just passes from one generation to the next, over and over again, and why it's fun to engage with.”

Hysmith adds that for many children, cheese is a safe food. “If you're feeding small children who are very picky,” she said, “there's this recognition in young eaters that they know what this food is.”

Cheesy Humor

Since cheese is fairly common, it seems to have some inherent humorous appeal. Scalzi described it as a bit absurd when you think about what cheese actually is: “you take the emanations of a cow, and then you let bacteria feast on it until it gets stinky and lumpy, and then it becomes really delicious.”

“If you were to explain cheese to somebody who had never encountered it before, like an alien,” Scalzi continues, “They would look at you like you were trying to put one over on them.” He adds, “I'm a very strong believer that cheese is one of those foods that started off as a dare.” One can only hope he is joking!

When asked if she found the concept of cheese amusing, Hysmith agrees. “The word ‘cheese’ is a funny word. In English-speaking countries, we use cheese as a way to smile for photos,” she notes. Using the example of Wallace and Gromit, she points out, “it's a fun word to say, especially thinking of the Wallace and Gromit bit, they have a way of saying cheese that is extra funny.”

The moon also has a similar trajectory, though usually it’s more of a source of ridicule than humor. Hysmith pointed out that we have a long history of associating the Moon with mental illness, hence the word “Lunatic.” Even now, people are not taking the Moon seriously; companies and billionaires are thinking about mining the Moon for its resources. (For a good history of the Moon and its profound relationship to the Earth and human society, check out Rebecca Boyles’ Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (2024)).

The Mechanics of the Moon Made of Cheese

The genius of Scalzi’s book is that he imagines a world where the moon does turn to cheese and the implications of it from a physical and cultural point of view. Scalzi has a background in astronomy: in 2003, he published The Rough Guide to the Universe, reprinted in 2008; and he also conducted some cheese research. Using scientific fiction, Scalzi addresses two things: the fantastical idea that the moon is made of cheese, and the implications of the Moon being cheese.

One big choice was to make the cheese Moon the same mass as the actual Moon, because he did not want to worry about the impact of tides. But that would change the density and gravity, which would cause it to compress and it would likely cause eruptions on the moon. The Moon would also be brighter and more visible than when it was merely rock.

Generally, Scalzi tried to keep the physics vague enough that he could focus on the more interesting aspects. “The secret of science fiction is you don’t have to over-explain because the people who don’t care don’t care, and the people who do care are the people who will catch you up,” Scalzi explained.

Similarly, Scalzi did not specify the type of cheese. Different cheeses would have different impact; a hard cheese would have less moisture than other cheeses, which would change the physics of it all, which Scalzi did not want to investigate. But he knows that someone will show up on each tour and tell him that they did the math to determine what cheese it could be.

Cheese Moon Thought Experiment

For another take on the Moon made of cheese, Ragahavan notes that the Moon would hypothetically be much bigger than it currently is, possibly 15 times bigger than it already is. That change would hypothetically change the orbit of the Moon and thus change the tides since the Moon’s gravity impacts our tidal waves. A change in orbit would also change our definition of a month, which is derived from the moon cycle, and our definition of a day from sunrise to sunset.

The Moon as cheese would also have a biological impact since there are animals and plants that rely on moonlight. Some animals, like owls, hunt only at night. A brighter moon may make it easier for prey to escape predators.

Those are just a few areas of off-the-cuff speculation about the possible implications if the Moon were cheese.

A final note, when asked if Scalzi would eat theoretical Moon cheese, he said, “I probably wouldn't eat the Moon cheese that was on the direct surface of the Moon, because it is being bombarded by cosmic rays and has probably just turned into carbon.”

The moon has big differences of temperature, 240 degrees or so C facing the Earth and -200C away from the Earth. Scalzi notes, “That cheese has undergone a lot of refrigeration and heating damage. I would actually drill down a couple hundred yards or something and get actual oon cheese that has not been exposed to all this cosmic radiation.”