• Question: why do people think the moon is made of cheese?

    Asked by curie to Josh, Serena, Simone, Stuart on 26 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Simone Sturniolo

      Simone Sturniolo answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Hey – it’s round, white-yellowish, and full of holes. Why not?

      …if I don’t remember badly, Neil Armstrong himself said it when he landed on it: “It’s a small step for a man, a giant leap for emmenthal”. Or something like that.

    • Photo: Josh Makepeace

      Josh Makepeace answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      I just read an interesting fact – apparently there’s a Google Moon where you can look at pictures of the Moon’s surface. Apparently, before the very high resolution images were available, if you zoomed in enough on the surface of the moon using Google Moon, a picture of swiss cheese would appear!! 😀

      Love the cheese joke, Simone. I’ll add another, though it’s not Moon-related.

      What happened after an explosion at the cheese factory?
      All that was left was de-brie!

    • Photo: Stuart Archer

      Stuart Archer answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      I didn’t know about that Josh, thanks for that 🙂

      Apparently this is a bit of a folklore that sprang up around the year 1000 in Jewish France. The original tale is said to talk about a fox who lead a wolf to believe that the reflection of the moon in the water was in fact a wheel of cheese, so the wolf drinks the water to try and get to the cheese and bursts, leaving the fox to go on about his business!

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