Swiss Cheese Security

There are many things I love about Estonia, but Estonian cheese is not one of them. My local supermarket offers three Estonian cheeses, which are labelled as “Cheese”, “Low-fat Cheese” and “Hard cheese”.

Some Estonian cheeseries try to branch out, boldly offering gouda and cheddar, which somehow tastes exactly like the standard Estonian cheese but in a slightly more exciting colour. Estonians like to serve cheese cut into squares and covered in spices or mixed into dough for deep frying, both of which are delicious; however, I feel this is more of a case of “making the best of what we’ve got” rather than a marker of quality cheese.

I say all this not to cheese-shame Estonians, who have many other endearing traits and lots of legitimately good food, but to explain why I left Switzerland with my suitcase full of cheese. I picked up big wedges of Appenzeller and Gruyére and a dozen Tête de Moine rosettes and a small wedge of something stinky and two large blocks of mozzarella, and then I threw in a couple of Swiss sausages for good measure.

Now, you can get perfectly good balls of mozzarella in brine in Estonia but what you can’t get is the firm type that you can grate. You can buy pre-grated mozzarella, if you don’t mind that it is coated in some sort of starchy flour. I do mind. So, although it’s not a traditional Swiss cheese, I picked up two vacuum-sealed blocks of low-moisture mozzarella cheese for pizza making. They were packed in a small amount of brine, but it was obviously less than 100ml of liquid, so I didn’t foresee that being a problem. The bigger issue was that my carry-on luggage was limited to eight kilos and I had definitely exceeded that. I had probably exceeded eight kilos with the cheese alone.

I pride myself on being efficient at airports. When I arrive at the security check at Zurich airport, I open my suitcase and pull out my pre-packed clear bag holding miniatures of toothpaste, sunscreen and moisturizer. Then I look at the cheeses again and think, That block of mozzarella is definitely in quite a bit of liquid. I wonder if that will show up in the scan?

And so I remove it and place it in the tray next to my clear plastic bag.

I walk through the metal detector and watch for my things. My suitcase goes through the scanner and Scanner Guy moves it to the side for a further check. Damn.

Then my tray of additional things goes through and Scanner Guy stares at the image on his monitor. Then, he waits for the tray to come out and stops the conveyor belt to take a better look. He picks up the cheese with a mild sound of disbelief and glances around the room.

I smile and give a little wave.

He holds up the cheese. “Is this yours?”

“Yes,” I say.

He doesn’t react like this answers his question.

“I put it with the liquids,” I explain.

He stares at me for a moment. Then he puts the cheese back in the tray and diverts the lot to the side for further checking.

At the far end, a broad-shouldered woman with tired eyes is going through the bags that failed Scanner Guy’s scan. She does not look as though she is having a good day. She opens my suitcase and looks at me.

“This is full of cheese,” she says, as if she isn’t sure she believes the evidence of her eyes.

“Yes,” I say. She seems to expect something more. “I like cheese,” I explain. “There’s some sausages, too.”

“The sausages are fine.” She frowns. “But I’m going to have to check the cheese.”

Check for what? It’s probably better not to ask. “OK.” I smile. To my surprise, she smiles back.

“But there’s another one in the tray,” I say, trying to be helpful.

“There’s more cheese?”

“In that tray.” I point at the tray. Surely I’m not the only person to have bought cheese in Switzerland? “It’s mozzarella and it’s a bit wet so I put it with my liquids.”

She gives me a very long look. I blink first. She gets the mozzarella and looks at it and then looks at me again, shaking her head. Then she picks up the rest of the cheese from my case.  Her arms are full with cheese. “Is this all of it?”

“Yes.”

She takes them to speak to someone else, some sort of supervisor, I presume, and then comes back and starts putting them back into my suitcase. “These are fine,” she says, “but not the mozzarella. You’ll have to leave them.” She puts the two blocks to the side.

“Both mozzarellas?”

She looks honestly sorry that she’s stealing my cheese. “Yes. They both have liquid around them.”

“Right, but I thought if I put it with the liquids, it’d be ok, like my shampoo.”

“A hundred ml,” she says. She waves one of the offending blocks of cheese at me. “This is four hundred grams alone.”

Four hundred grams net weight! Not including the liquid! I should probably not argue with airport security. It wasn’t expensive cheese, and I have the other stuff, but I was really looking forward to making myself pizza. I bite my tongue.

She gives me a pitying look. “Were you going to eat it right away?”

“What, right now?” I imagine standing there, eating a kilo of mozzarella straight out of the packet and trying not to be sick. I want my cheese but not that badly.

She laughs. “No, I didn’t mean right here. Are you going straight home?”

“Um, yes?” I have no idea what she’s getting at.

“OK, then, what you could  do…” She glances towards the Someone Else who is probably a supervisor and leans in a bit closer. “You could pierce the cheese packaging and drain out all the liquid.”

“And then I could keep the cheese?”

“I think so.”

I’m imagining the mess that the drippy cheese will make of my hiking clothes and trying to decide if I care. But this woman is the savior of my cheese; how can I tell her no? “That would be wonderful,” I say.

“Hold on for a moment.” She goes away and talks to the Someone Else again and comes back and just says, “You need to wait.”

The Savior of my Cheese deals with a grumpy teenager who is very belligerent that she needs to open her backpack for a search. The woman pulls out a telephone, a laptop and a Nintendo Switch and explains that these are meant to be taken out and scanned separately. Once she dismisses the sulky teen, she hands me the blocks of mozzarella. “Come with me.” She talks to the person who does the body check to explain that I need to go out again but I will be right back. Scanner Guy stops the conveyor belt to watch.

We go past the security line and she hands me a paper clip. “Just poke a hole in and drain it into here,” she says, pointing at the trash can for people to drop their water bottles.

I poke large holes into the plastic and yes, the cheeses really do have quite a bit of liquid in them. People waiting to have their items scanned are staring at me, trying to work out what’s going on. I shake the dripping cheese. “Like that?”

She takes the wetter cheese and wrings it out a bit with an apologetic look and puts it into one of the plastic bags they give you to put your liquids in. “When you get home, you can put it in salt water.”

The entire situation is increasingly bizarre. “I’m sorry?”

“If you don’t want to eat all of this right away, I mean. Because that’s a lot of cheese. You could put it into salt water. I didn’t know if you knew that.”

“No, I did not know that,” I say. “Thank you.” I shove the other cheese into the plastic bag and seal it.

She nods her approval and sends me back through security. Scanner Guy waves me away; he does not want to see my cheese again. I’m to go straight through the metal detector and get out of his sight.

The waiting passengers stare at me like why does she get special priority and why is she holding a plastic bag of squished cheese?

I pack the mozzarella into my case under my newfound friend’s watchful eye. “Thank you very much,” I tell her. “I’ll try the salt-water thing.”

“Have a very nice dinner,” she says, already turning towards the next bag coming through. 

No one weighs the suitcase at the gate, but when I board the plane, I realize it is too heavy for very-short me to lift into the very-high overhead bin. 

“Lassen Sie mich,” says a young Swiss man. He reaches for my suitcase.

“Vorsichtig,” I say, worried he’ll underestimate the weight. “Es ist voller Käse.” It’s full of cheese.

He blinks at me and starts over. “Let me get that,” he says in English. He’s clearly decided I don’t speak German. I must sound like something out of a Monty Python sketch: my hovercraft is full of eels!

“Thank you,” I say in English without further elaboration. I sit down and stare straight ahead until the urge to laugh hysterically passes. It takes most of the two-hour flight.

Photo by Azzedine Rouichi on Unsplash