The new new Prometheus


cheese

Microbiologists are the Frankensteins for our century. They are creating new stinky life.

Cheese is known for its stinky odor. But, cheeses at one exhibit at the Science Gallery Dublin in Trinity College Dublin come from an especially smelly source — human toe, armpit, belly button and mouth bacteria.

Selfmade, which is part of the Grow Your Own…Life After Nature exhibition, features different “microbial sketches” of cheeses created with bacteria samples from various people. Each cheese supposedly smells similar to the donor’s body odor.

I have so many questions. Do they cackle, “IT’S ALIVE!” when they create a new cheese? Do they gloat over their racks of cheeses, their legions with which they will take over the world?

I hope they never sell out and start making celebrity toe cheeses, though. The Kardashians have taken over enough markets with their total lack of talent.

Comments

  1. says

    We must get congress to pass IP laws which allow us to build a business model on our own personal odors.
    Of course, then we’ll have “B.O. Patent Trolls” following us around on hot days sniffing us and handing us cease and desist orders.

  2. opposablethumbs says

    This is … charming, delightful, wonderful and kind of really rather off-putting. I’m not sure I’d be all that keen on eating cheese made using my bacteria (no worse than other cheeses, but surely no better either) and I certainly wouldn’t see the attraction in eating cheese made using anyone else’s.

    Oh no. People might, mightn’t they – they might go for symbolically consuming the body of a favourite celebrity …

    argh.

    Do. Not. Want.

    But hey! How about Jesus Cheese?!?!?! I’m sure somebody could lie about using microbes taken from the Turin Shroud or some such nonsense – and then you could market the ultimate snack: Jeebus Cheese and Holy Communion Jeebus Crackers!

  3. Big Boppa says

    opposablethumbs @3

    Communion would be so much more efficient if the Jeebus cheese were in a spray can.

  4. Al Dente says

    Lofty @13

    The correct quote of Granny Weatherwax’s sign is “I ATE’NT DEAD”. Please note the placement of the apostrophe.

  5. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    Each cheese supposedly smells similar to the donor’s body odor.

    Sweet Dog….

  6. Richard Smith says

    @Big Boppa (#10):

    Communion would be so much more efficient if the Jeebus cheese were in a spray can.

    Easy Cheesus!

  7. Hoosier X says

    Breakfast will be later than usual this morning. Much later. I may never eat again. Maybe after the Kill La Kill marathon.

  8. says

    When I was a kid, my parents dragged me to the Roquefort caves. I got to watch the cheese being made (this was in the late 1960s) and even got a bit of cheese-juice squirted on me… They had this huge burlap sack full of curds that they were draining the whey from by twisting the sack with a long oar-like piece of wood, and juice was squirting all over… And then I went to the “ageing” room, which was full of things that looked like chia pets and which smelled like ass. I’m not sure if it’s necessary to make cheeses that smell more like ass.

    I haven’t eaten anything but the most mild cheeses (mostly: thick butter) since then. I don’t think a cheese smelling of my armpit would change my mind much, either.

  9. John Horstman says

    Noooooooooooope nope nope.

    This gives the smegma euphemism “dick cheese” a horrible new meaning.

  10. Big Boppa says

    Marcus @20

    I’m not sure if it’s necessary to make cheeses that smell more like ass.

    If they do, it can be called Assiago.

    John @21

    Colby-Jock?

  11. ZugTheMegasaurus says

    “I hope they never sell out and start making celebrity toe cheeses, though. The Kardashians have taken over enough markets with their total lack of talent.”

    Don’t you mean TOE-tal? HAHAHAHAHAHA

    …I’ll show myself out.

  12. blf says

    The mildly deranged penguin points out the best cheeses are carefully hand-picked by virgins on the vast cheese plantations of Atlantis, then slowly aged in quote a variety of different locations (the “volcanic” eruption near Pompeii awhile ago was a forgotten cheese aging pit full of quite ripe cheeses exploding), and then stored in the moon (hence the saying the moon is “made” of cheese — not really, it’s just full of the stuff). There’s quite a variety of flowering plants, weeds, fungus, and MUSHROOMS! growing in underarms, other regions, and, perhaps especially, beards. Clearly, some of the growth could be cheese plants or fungus or triffids. So actually harvesting the cheese seems worthwhile. Moar cheese!

    However, she suspects it’s not very good cheese unless the farm / farmer is a virgin from Atlantis who hasn’t been blown-up too many times by overripened cheese. Perhaps.

  13. =8)-DX says

    What an excellent [insert cheese pun here] idea! No, actually I would totally eat a cheese that smelled like my armits. Oddly appropriate, since at the moment I’m drinking beer that smells like my piss after asparagus.

  14. Hairhead, whose head is entirely filled with Too Much Stuff says

    Okay, I’ll have say this because no-one’s said it: There are hundreds of thousands of dedicated foot-fetishists with disposable income; a cheese made with and smelling like their particular fetishes (and perhaps their own lady-or-man-love) would have a GUARANTEED market.

    And let’s not forget the body-hair, armpit, crotch-smell fetishists. College-age youth of both sexes will no longer have to sell their used underwear over the internet, they will produce artisanal cheeses across a range of sensorial stimuli . . . need I go further?

  15. Big Boppa says

    Hairhead @32

    Yes….please go on. I’m almost there….ungh….ungh…..uuuuuuuuunnnnggggghhhh……

  16. says

    rietplum @12:

    Could hardly be worse than Munster cheese.

    Now I’m wondering what a cheese made from any of the Munsters would taste like.
    Eddie Cheese
    Marilyn Cheese
    Herman Cheese (not to be confused with Herman Cain)