Cheese Art: The Movement

For the 6,000 or so years since cheese was invented, people have continually come up with new and interesting things to do with it.

Grate it, melt it, chop it. Put it on toast. Stuff it into chickens. Layer it on tuna. (Click here for a brief history.)

But for all the myriad ways there are to eat cheese, I must say I'm surprised by a recent trend in art: using cheese as a material for sculpture.

A few weeks back, I reported on the guy who replicated Mount Rushmore in a 700-lb. block of cheese. But it turns out that this story is bigger than just a single artist working in cheese. This is becoming a movement, like Cubism. (Which, come to think of it, might become an offshoot of the cheese sculpture game, in which sculptors work exclusively with those little bags of pre-chopped Kraft.)

In Indiana, an artist named Sarah Kauffman regularly wow the crowds at the State Fair with her monumental works in cheese, which tend to honor local legends. This year's subject: the Indianapolis 500.

In Montgomery County, Md., an entire cheese sculpting competition recently took place, according to the Washington Post. (Click here for the story.)

I'm not sure any of these works will be headed for museums any time soon. But it does prove one thing, though: there's a lot you can do with cheese.