Weird Uses for Cheese: Space Payloads, Plastic Buttons and Presidential Cheddar

A wheel of cheese has flown to orbit, milk protein became plastic buttons, and presidents got 1,200-pound cheeses. Cheese's strangest documented second careers.

Cheese is food. But across two centuries, people have also launched it into orbit, turned its protein into plastic, used it as a political monument, and — most stubbornly of all — cast it as the favourite snack of an animal that does not actually like it very much. These are the strangest documented second careers of cheese and the milk it comes from.

Use one: secret space payload

On 8 December 2010, SpaceX flew its Dragon capsule for the first time — the first commercial spacecraft ever launched into orbit and recovered. Alongside the ballast and souvenirs, bolted inside a metal canister labelled "Top Secret," rode a large wheel of Le Brouère, a French cheese. CEO Elon Musk kept the payload secret until after splashdown in the Pacific, about 500 miles west of Mexico, then explained it was a tribute to Monty Python's famous Cheese Shop sketch — the one about a cheese shop with no cheese in it. SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost confirmed the wheel survived in good order, "basking in the glow of being the first cheese to travel to orbit on a commercial spacecraft." Spaceflight's first commercial cargo, in other words, was dairy.

Use two: plastic

The protein that sets your curd — casein — is also a material. In 1897, German printer Wilhelm Krische, who had been commissioned to find an alternative to blackboards, worked with chemist Adolph Spitteler and found that casein treated with formaldehyde becomes hard, insoluble and carveable. The result was commercialised as Galalith, from the Greek gala (milk) and lithos (stone): literally, milk stone.

For the first half of the twentieth century, casein plastic was everywhere small and polished: buttons, beads, buckles, combs, fountain pens, umbrella handles, cutlery handles and knitting needles, often pigmented to imitate ivory, horn, jade, pearl and tortoiseshell. It sold under a small atlas of trade names — Galalith in Germany, Erinoid in Britain (made from 1914 to 1980), Lactoid in England, Aladdinite and Karolith in the United States. It could not be poured or injection-moulded like a modern plastic, either: cured sheets and rods were cut, then hot-stamped into limited shapes, which is why it suited small goods. It was slow stuff — curing a sheet 2.5 cm thick could take up to a year — which is part of why petroleum plastics eventually buried it. The protein kept finding work, though: in the 1930s, Italian chemist Antonio Ferretti developed a method of spinning casein into fibre (Lanital), so for a while milk could also be worn as cloth.

Use three: presidential monument

Twice, Americans decided the correct gift for a president was more than half a ton of cheddar. In 1802, the Baptist congregation of Cheshire, Massachusetts, presented Thomas Jefferson with a "mammoth cheese" of about 1,235 pounds, made — by local account — from the milk of some 900 cows and engraved with the motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Jefferson, who had a policy of refusing gifts, paid $200 for it. It was still being served to guests more than a year later.

Andrew Jackson's supporters wanted the same honour paid to him, and went bigger. In 1835, New York dairyman Thomas S. Meacham sent Jackson a cheddar of about 1,400 pounds — four feet across and two feet thick. It sat in the White House entrance hall for over a year, aging and announcing itself. On 22 February 1837, with his presidency nearly over, Jackson threw open the doors and invited the public in to eat it. Thousands came; by most accounts the entire wheel was gone in about two hours. The cheese left faster than its smell: Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, reportedly had to air out the rooms, discard drapes and repaint. The episode is the origin of the White House's revived "Big Block of Cheese Day."

Use four: feeding mice (badly)

The most persistent weird use is the mousetrap — and it rests on a cartoon. When Dr. David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University actually studied rodent food preferences, he found that mice strongly prefer grains, fruit and sweet things; they will eat cheese if they are hungry enough, but it is nowhere near a favourite, and strong-smelling cheese can actively put them off. The likely origin of the myth is medieval housekeeping: in an age when meat was hung out of reach and grain was sealed in jars, cheese was often the one rich food left sitting accessible in cupboards and cellars — so when a mouse was caught eating something, it was usually the cheese. Cheese did not win the mouse's heart. It just lost the storage war. Pest-control guidance that has looked at the question reaches the same conclusion from the other direction: the recommended trap baits are chocolate, peanut butter and seeds — the foods mice actually go looking for.

The pattern

Strip the comedy away and the weird uses share a logic. Cheese is concentrated, durable, portable value: energy-dense enough to serve as a spaceflight joke with a point, protein-rich enough to become a material, and valuable enough that two presidents received it the way other heads of state receive horses or wine. The wheel in your cave is the same substance — minus the rocket.

Casein, cultures and curd are this site's home turf: the culture guides explain the bacteria and moulds behind all twenty starters and adjuncts we cover — the living ingredients that turn milk into everything above, no launch pad required.