In case you missed the high stakes current events out of Europe last week:

France has been rocked by the Great Cheese Heist of November 2015.  A rogue gang hit the eastern French town of Goux-les-Usiers, breaking into a Napiot dairy near the Swiss border.  The nighttime pilferers cut through barbed wire fence and used a crow bar to liberate 100 wheels of hard, aged Comté cheese.

Apparently Comté cheese is a delicacy that leans more toward couture than bargain basement when it comes to indulgences in the dairy world.  The stolen cheese is worth roughly $45,000 which makes it an excellent candidate for the black market.  (Yes, apparently there’s an underground black market for French artisan cheese.  Who knew.)  Unloading the specialty cheese won’t be a piece of cake, though, seeing as the wheels are essentially lojacked by the serial numbers stamped on their bottom.

Though the payoff would be huge, stealing this much cheese was no small undertaking.  One hundred wheels of Comté weigh about four tons so you’d need some serious manpower.  Police are looking into recent thefts of large-sized vehicles in the area that might be able to move that kind of cargo.  There isn’t much in the way of clues to go on: either French gangs are incredibly stealthy or the dairy’s neighbors sleep like the dead because locals are claiming to have heard nothing out of the ordinary.

So there you are.

Don’t say I never write about world events.

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“Who moved my cheese?” – PRI’s The World

Four-tonne cheese heist leaves French police stumped – The Telegraph