The 'Moon Is Made of Cheese' Trope

The "Moon Is Made of Cheese" Trope

This article relates to When the Moon Hits Your Eye

While the central conceit of John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye is that the Moon has turned to cheese, the book is not overly concerned with how this has happened. Instead, it's more interested in how the world — specifically America — reacts to such a sudden, inexplicable event, as well as what happens when science takes its natural course. If something with the size and mass of the Moon were made of an organic compound like cheese rather than rock, it would immediately start to implode, launching geysers and huge chunks of cheese into space — and, unfortunately for us Earthlings, directly at our planet.

Cold, hard science has never gotten in the way of folklore before, however, and the Moon being made of cheese is a common folkloric trope. (This is referred to in Scalzi's novel, as Dayton Bailey, a beleaguered pop science author, receives a boon when his book containing a chapter about the logistics of Moon cheese becomes suddenly relevant.) Contrary to what some may think, nobody ever actually thought that the Moon was made of cheese. In fact, "They think the Moon is made of green cheese" was a common saying in the 17th century, something you might say about someone you believed to be deeply stupid and gullible. (In this context, "green" refers to its relative newness, not its color.)

The possible origin of the trope may be a medieval Slavic fable where a wolf, seeing the Moon reflected in a lake, mistakes it for a wheel of cheese and tries to eat it. Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, a collection of offbeat just-so stories about various scientific phenomena, opens with "The Distance of the Moon," which uses the fact that the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth as a jumping-off point for a story about people climbing up to the Moon on a ladder to harvest liquid cheese. A Grand Day Out, the 1989 debut film of Wallace & Gromit, also concerns itself with cheese harvesting.

The trope has also appeared in episodes of Tom and Jerry and The Beverly Hillbillies, and features in video games such as Mario Kart and Minecraft. There is also a snack food called Moon Cheese that is essentially small dehydrated pieces of cheese (which resemble the Moon).

Cheese, courtesy of おにぎり on Unsplash

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This article relates to When the Moon Hits Your Eye. It first ran in the April 9, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.