Human Cheese

An unusual and somewhat smelly exhibit opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in the United Kingdom, in 2019. It showcased five types of cheeses—all made with the help of bacteria collected from people’s armpits, belly buttons, nostrils, and toes!

To make any type of cheese, cheese makers must add specific strains, or types, of bacteria to milk. These microbes consume sugars in the milk and produce acid as waste. The sour-tasting chemicals cause solids in milk to clump into curds, says Rob Ralyea, a food scientist at Cornell University in New York.

Next, the curds are shaped into blocks and allowed to age. They sit in a controlled environment for days, months, or even years while bacteria keep working to transform the mixture into cheese. This process gives different cheeses their unique flavors.

“Many of the microbes involved in cheese making bear a close relationship to those found on human skin,” says Catherine Flood. She’s a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

For the human-cheese project, biologists collected bacteria from the bodies of five volunteers. Then the samples were used in the traditional cheese-making process.

No one tasted the end product on display at the museum. That’s because the human body hosts hundreds of different microbes, some of which can make people sick. This means eating cheese made from that bacteria isn’t safe. But if it were, would you try a bite?