Cheese Facts for Kids

Imagine finding a snack that's older than your great-great-great-grandparents! Scientists discovered actual, solid cheese buried next to mummies in China’s Tarim Basin. This ancient dairy delight is about 3,600 years old!

This amazing find was a type of kefir cheese, made from cow and goat milk, showing people were making complex fermented foods way back in the Bronze Age. They even found bacteria DNA still inside the cheese!

That’s way older than the 3,200-year-old cheese found in an Egyptian tomb, making the Chinese discovery the current world champion for oldest cheese residue!

You read that right—moose cheese! At the Elk House in Bjursholm, Sweden, they make a super rare cheese from the milk of just three domesticated moose named Gullan, Haelga, and Juna.

Because milking a moose is super hard and they only produce milk for a short time each year, this cheese is very pricey. You could pay up to $455 per pound!

That means one tiny one-pound block costs more than a brand-new video game! It must taste like victory!

When you are a baby, your body knows how to break down the sugar in milk—that’s called lactose. But for many people, once they stop drinking their mother's milk, their bodies stop making the special 'key' (an enzyme) to unlock that sugar.

Evidence from 7,400-year-old strainer pots in China suggests people figured out that if you strain the milk to make cheese, you remove most of the lactose sugar! This meant they could eat a delicious dairy food without getting a tummy ache.

It was an ancient science hack to safely enjoy milk, proving cheesemakers have been smart scientists for thousands of years!

If moose milk isn't wild enough, meet Pule cheese! This incredibly rare cheese comes from the Balkan region of Serbia and is made from the milk of donkeys—yes, actual donkeys!

Donkey milk is much harder to get than cow milk. It takes about 25 liters of donkey milk to make just one kilogram (2.2 lbs) of Pule cheese.

Because it takes so much milk, this crumbly, tangy cheese can sell for up to $590 per pound! That’s like buying almost 50 regular sticks of butter for the price of one pound of Pule!

Most cheese you eat at home is ready in a few weeks or months, but some artisan cheeses go on a very long vacation! This resting time is called aging or affinage.

For a very dry, hard cheese, aging can last for 2 to 5+ years! This long rest lets the cheese develop crunchy spots, called tyrosine crystals, which are packed with intense flavor.

The longer it ages, the more the flavor concentrates—it’s like concentrating juice, but for cheese!

When you see blue or green veins in cheese, don't panic! That’s not spoiled cheese; that’s a special, edible mold, often from the Penicillium family, that cheesemakers want to grow there.

For famous cheeses like Roquefort, the mold is often added, and then the cheese is aged in damp, cool caves where the mold grows perfectly. It’s what gives these cheeses their sharp, zesty flavor.

The world record for the strongest-smelling cheese often goes to washed-rind cheeses, where the outside is washed with liquids—sometimes even brandy—to encourage unique, stinky rinds!

When you buy Parmesan (or Parmigiano-Reggiano), you usually get a tiny, pre-grated container. But in Italy, this cheese is made in giant wheels that weigh between 30 and 41 kilograms—that's 66 to 90 pounds!

These massive wheels can be almost 20 inches across (as tall as a 5-year-old kid!) and are so hard and dense you usually have to break them into chunks instead of slicing them neatly.

Because they are so big, they take a long time to age and develop that super-nutty, savory flavor that makes them famous!

Wisconsin, the 'Cheese State,' knows how to party! In 2018, they built a Guinness World Record cheese platter that weighed an amazing 2,012.85 kilograms—that's 4,437 pounds!

To put that in perspective, that's heavier than two small cars sitting side-by-side on a massive board! They used about 145 different varieties of Wisconsin cheese.

The biggest single cheese on that platter was a Mammoth Cheddar that alone weighed 2,064 pounds—almost as much as a small car!

This is the saddest fact: the Moon is NOT made of cheese! Even though cartoons often show astronauts taking bites out of a giant wheel of Swiss cheese, the Moon is actually made of rock, dust, and craters.

Scientists have studied Moon rocks brought back to Earth and they are full of minerals, not milk fats. The 'holes' you see on the Moon are big impact craters, not the holes made by gas bubbles in cheese.

So, while a Moon made of cheese sounds like the ultimate fantasy, we'll just have to enjoy our Earth-bound dairy delights instead!

We talked about cow, goat, and donkey milk, but some cultures even make cheese from camel milk! This is most common in parts of Africa and the Middle East where camels are more common than cows.

Camel milk is special because it has less fat than cow’s milk, but it’s packed with vitamins and minerals. This makes the resulting cheese very nutritious for kids and explorers alike!

It proves that if you have milk, you can probably turn it into cheese—it just takes the right recipe and temperature!