The Moon has a mass of roughly 7.342 × 10²² kilograms. That is a lot of cheese. If we're talking cheddar (density about 1,075 kg/m³ compared to the Moon's actual average of 3,344 kg/m³), our cheese moon would need to be considerably larger to maintain the same gravitational pull, or we accept a lighter moon and deal with the consequences.
Let's deal with the consequences.
Which cheese, specifically
This matters more than you'd think. A moon made of fresh mozzarella behaves very differently from one made of aged Parmesan. Mozzarella is soft, high in moisture, and would deform under its own gravity into a slightly squashed blob. Parmesan is dense, brittle, and low in moisture. It would hold its shape better but crack under tidal stress.
For this exercise, I'm going with a mature cheddar. It's structurally reasonable, culturally appropriate (the original "moon is made of cheese" folklore is English), and I refuse to live in a universe where the Moon is made of something boring like Edam.
A cheddar moon of the same volume as our current Moon would have about 32% of its mass. This changes everything about the Earth-Moon relationship, starting with the tides.
Tides, or the lack of them
Tidal forces are proportional to mass. Drop the Moon's mass to a third and the tides shrink accordingly. Coastal ecosystems that depend on tidal cycles would look completely different. Mudflats and estuaries would be calmer, shallower, less dynamic. Species that synchronise breeding with tidal patterns (horseshoe crabs, grunion, certain corals) would have evolved different strategies or not evolved at all.
Ports built for current tidal ranges wouldn't need tidal barriers. The Thames Barrier would be unnecessary. Venice would still flood, because Venice's problems are less about tides and more about a city built on wooden piles in a lagoon and then allowed to sink for six hundred years, but that's a separate article.
Surfers would be annoyed. Waves wouldn't vanish entirely (wind drives most wave action), but the deep ocean swells driven by tidal forces would be weaker. Surfing culture might never have developed in the same way. No Baywatch. Make of that what you will.
The smell
Space is a vacuum, so cheese on the lunar surface wouldn't smell. But the Moon isn't completely inert. Solar radiation bombards it constantly. Cosmic rays penetrate its surface. And cheese, unlike basalt, is organic matter. It contains proteins, fats, and bacteria.
Under intense UV radiation, the surface layer of cheddar would break down. Casein proteins would degrade. Fats would oxidise. The top few metres would become a kind of irradiated cheese crust, while the interior (protected by its own mass) would remain relatively intact, slowly aging under enormous pressure.
Now, the Moon does lose particles. Solar wind sputters atoms off the lunar surface, creating a thin exosphere. A cheese moon would be sputtering off molecules of butyric acid, methane, hydrogen sulphide, and various other volatile organic compounds. These would form a faint but detectable halo around the Moon.
Would the smell reach Earth? Not in any concentration you'd notice by stepping outside. The 384,400 kilometres between us and the Moon would diffuse it to effectively nothing. But sensitive instruments would pick it up. Astronomers would have spent centuries puzzling over the Moon's anomalous organic spectral signature before anyone thought to check whether it smelled like a Wensleydale that had been left in a car.
Space agencies lose their minds
The moment we confirmed the Moon was cheese (let's say sometime in the early space age, when we first got close enough for spectral analysis), the entire trajectory of space exploration would change.
NASA's Apollo programme wasn't cheap. The total cost, adjusted for inflation, was around $257 billion. Now imagine pitching that budget to Congress, except instead of bringing back grey rocks, you're bringing back the most expensive cheese in human history. Funding approved by lunchtime.
The space race between the US and Soviet Union would have been even more intense. Whoever controls the Moon controls an effectively infinite food reserve. Or at least, that's what the propaganda would say. In reality, the cost per kilogram of lunar cheese delivered to Earth would make it the most absurdly expensive food ever produced. Saffron costs about $5,000 per kilogram. Lunar cheddar would cost somewhere north of $500,000 per kilogram, assuming reusable launch vehicles, which we didn't have until very recently.
That wouldn't stop billionaires from buying it. There would absolutely be a restaurant in Dubai selling lunar cheese boards for the price of a house.
Structural integrity
A real problem: cheese is not geologically stable at this scale.
The Moon's interior is hot. Even our current Moon has a partially molten core, with temperatures reaching around 1,400°C at the centre. A cheese moon would generate less internal heat (lower mass, no radioactive elements), but gravitational compression would still warm the core significantly.
Cheddar melts at about 66°C. The interior of our cheese moon would be molten cheese. Liquid. Flowing. A subsurface ocean of melted cheddar beneath a solid crust, like a massive fondue pot with a rind.
This creates a situation eerily similar to the real geological structure of icy moons like Europa (solid shell, liquid interior), except instead of water under ice, it's melted cheddar under solid cheddar. Tidal flexing from Earth's gravity would crack the crust periodically. Cheese geysers would erupt through fissures, spraying molten cheddar into the vacuum of space where it would instantly freeze into long strings.
The Moon would have cheese rings. Like Saturn, but dairy.
What we'd actually do with it
Mining operations would begin within decades of the first confirmed sample return. But lunar cheese mining faces problems that asteroid mining doesn't. The cheese is the Moon. Remove too much and you change its mass, which changes its orbit, which changes Earth's tides (what's left of them), axial tilt stability, and the length of our months.
There would be a political fight about this. Extraction companies would argue the Moon is so massive that removing a few million tonnes of cheddar per year is negligible. Environmental groups would argue that we already ruined one planet and could we please not eat the Moon as well. Both sides would have a point.
The cheese itself, once returned to Earth, would be the subject of the most intense food safety debate in history. Is four-billion-year-old cheddar safe to eat? It's been irradiated, compressed, and is older than multicellular life. The answer is almost certainly no, but that has never stopped people before. Someone would eat it. Someone would film it. It would get a hundred million views on whatever platform exists by then.
Looking up
The cheese moon would look different. Cheddar is more reflective than basalt. The Moon would be brighter, tinged faintly orange-yellow. Full moons would cast a warmer light. Poets throughout history would have written about the golden glow of the moon and meant it literally. Werewolf mythology might never have developed the same way. Hard to be frightened of a moon that looks like it belongs on a cheeseboard.
Lunar eclipses would smell faintly of fondue. I can't prove this, but I refuse to believe otherwise.