Moon Cheese

It’s Flash Fiction Friday! As such I present to you a futuristic daydream I once had: a cheesy, breezy pun riddled tale of biotechnology and happy accidents. I hope you enjoy.

Before you ask, there are no cows on the moon. Or goats, or sheep or camels, nor has there ever been. The Luna-moo Dairy Corporation would never trust something as unreliable as a lactating mammal to feed our citizens. We Lunarians are a pragmatic bunch, and so our nutritional supply chain is a marvel of biotechnology. Our everyday fare may turn the stomach of a refined upper-crust citizen of the United Earth Nations, a culture as obsessed with genetic purity as it is with slaughtering animals, but I think even they would choose a disk of cultured pork for lunch after a week of grazing on nothing but hydroponic spinach.

At the inception our colony was, by necessity, like some sort of vegan dream. Well it would have been, if such idealistic folk could have overlooked our obsessive genetic tinkering. Either way, the level headed colonists were too sensible, and too hungry, to wholeheartedly embrace meat-free ideology. Besides, anyone would have grown weary of expeller-pressed soy beverage every day for a decade, especially when the alternative was a $100 jug of reconstituted milk powder shipped almost 400,000 km.

And so our industrious agro-scientists put pen to paper, then cell to culture plate. If they could grow cow muscle why not cow mammary? It would have been utterly impractical to grow entire udders. Instead the clever scientists cultured only the secretory cells, fed by a network of blood vessels and an artificial heart. They strung up sacks of secretory cells in incubators, collecting milk with the gentle pull of lunar gravity. The home grown milk was an instant hit, and so the publicly owned Luna-moo Dairy Corporation was born. When you don’t need to grow a whole cow, genetic modification adds almost no effort to the process, so lactose free, casein free and even caffeinated milk was harvested directly from the mindless lactation sacks. In no time butter, cream and cheese was found in every meal in our humble colony.

On the greatest day of our history, a careless employee forgot to inoculate the milk vat with the starter culture. To the surprise of everyone at Luna-moo, the milk turned to cheese anyways! We called it Luna-curd and it was out of this world. A delightful combination of the sharpness of cheddar with the subtle buttery and nuttiness of Gruyère. Medium-hard, with holes like Emmental, but unlike that most infamous Swiss cheese with its few dozen bubbles, there were thousands only millimetres in size. It was truly the Champagne of cheeses! Most unusual of all, it was a pale green in colour. It became an overnight sensation. How was such an improbable cheese possible? In no time at all our astute food-scientists had the answer: the starter culture was supplied by cryptic microbial colonies in the air circulation system. These species were hardy, harmless to humans, and uniquely adapted to the moon’s microgravity.

Naturally, we were proud of our home grown dairy product. We sought entry to the 2088 World Championship Cheese Contest in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A, Earth, but were declined on the grounds that the Moon lay beyond “the World”. Preposterous of course, the Earth-Moon system was officially established to be a binary planet in the IAU ruling of 2059. Fortunately for us, when our legal experts reminded The Cheese Maker’s Association that the moon is legally 1.21 % of “the World”, they grudgingly welcomed us to take part.

The cheese artisans of Earth never saw us coming. We took the championship by storm, winning first place and the flurried attention of the media. Our bubbly, and slightly green, Luna-curd became the talk of every dinner table on Earth. Demand skyrocketed. Within a year Luna-curd was the colony’s largest export; within two the lunar economy had grown over 10,000 %. Meanwhile, back on Earth, attempts to replicate Luna-curd were entirely fruitless, made impossible by the relentless pull of 6 lunar g.

Luna-moo is owned by our citizens and so its success was our success. With our milk-money we invested in ourselves, pouring capital into manufacturing, research and tourism. Luna-curd was the catalyst that transformed our colony from a dusty, derelict moon base to the leading power of the inner solar system.

Without further ado, I welcome you to Luna. Please enjoy your visit. A complimentary cheese board is waiting for you and the end of the tour. All that I ask is when you return home and gaze up in the sky you remember: the moon was never made of cheese, but its fortune certainly was!

— Transcript of the Right Honourable Mayor of Tranquility personally welcoming a class of Earth students, circa 2155