Green cheese

Green cheese is a term for a fresh cheese, one that has not thoroughly dried yet, nor been aged, which is white in colour and usually round in shape. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a reference from the year 1542 of the four sorts of cheese. The first sort is green cheese, which is not green by reason of colour but for its newness, for the whey is not half pressed out of it yet. The phrase is not commonly used to describe the colour of a cheese, though there are some cheeses with a greenish tint, usually from mold or added herbs. The word "green" for new has other uses, such as greenhorn for an inexperienced person.

In popular culture

The phrase the Moon is made of green cheese refers to the similarity in appearance of a typical round, green cheese and the full Moon. It is commonly misinterpreted to mean that the Moon is green in colour, which does not occur.

John Maynard Keynes made a reference comparing a green cheese to the moon in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The exact meaning of the sentence is debated, but the equating of the moon with a green cheese is clear.:

Green Cheese (missile)

The Green Cheese missile was a British-made radar-guided anti-ship tactical nuclear warhead missile project of the 1950s. It was developed by Fairey Aviation to be used by the Fairey Gannet shipborne anti-submarine warfare aircraft, and was originally called Fairey Project 7. However, the missile's 3,800 lb (1720 kg) weight proved to be too heavy for the Gannet, and would have required modifications to the Gannet's bomb bay to expose the missiles' seeker heads to the target before launch. The missile project continued, since the Blackburn Buccaneer naval strike aircraft had a rotating bomb bay which was ideally suited to the task.

The project was cancelled in 1956 due in part to cost over-runs, at which point it had a reached a stage called Cockburn Cheese (after the British military scientist Dr. Robert Cockburn), and was replaced with the Green Flash project. This too was cancelled and the idea of a tactical nuclear-tipped guided missile for anti-shipping use was given up in favour of a simple "lobbed" tactical nuclear bomb, the WE.177A