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Mice don't actually like cheese, but it's not Tom and Jerry's fault
To cheese or not to cheese, that is the question!
It ain't easy being cheesy, but you cheddar brie-lieve we are going to clear Jerry's name! Mice don't like cheese, but Tom and Jerry are not the originators of this myth.
For years, mice have been associated with cheese, and many of us believed that the association started with Tom and Jerry. For Jerry, cheese was the goal of every cartoon, a hunk of cheddar or a cube of Swiss was an enticing trap laid by Tom or a brief reprieve from the trials and tribulations of being a mouse in a cat's world. Without fail, in each original theatrical Tom and Jerry cartoon, Jerry was chasing the cheese.
On the Science Talk podcast from Scientific American, Dr. David Holmes was interviewed about mice and cheese after he conducted a study on which foods repel and attract different animals. In the interview, Holmes said, "It’s kind of a very, very, very strange and... it certainly predates Tom and Jerry, and all, really, kind of cartoon mice; that somehow the people have got really [the] strange idea that mice actually do like cheese." In his research, he found that mice prefer sweet things like fruit and chocolate, but they especially enjoy another cartoon-related food: breakfast cereal.
Holmes believes that animation has played a major role in the association between mice and cheese, saying, "But as far as I can tell, (it) has become extremely popular because of this modern myth and into the minds of children and adults because all cartoonists. Cartoonists like to draw little segments of cheese with holes in them and little mice's faces poking out of them. They will admit this and they would say quite simply it's a really good image, it's a kind of image we can use and it's the kind, maybe we will continue to use even though we know that mice don't like cheese."
While Tom and Jerry may have popularized the myth that mice go feral for feta, the association actually began much earlier, like in the late Medieval Period to the Early Renaissance. In the age before modern refrigeration, household cheese was kept in wheels, often covered in a protective layer of wax, close to the ground. Mice likely ate other foods like grains and legumes, but most often, when they nibbled at cheese, they left behind evidence in the form of teeth marks in the wax.
Before long, images of mice nibbling on cheese appeared in paintings and even plays. One of the earliest texts highlighting the mouse-cheese connection comes from William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, a tragedy set in the Trojan War. In Act V, scene IV, Thersites the Fool, looks for food while watching a battle begin, saying, "That stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese."
And, while mice may or may not have eaten more of the other foods, cheese was the only food that showed evidence of mice being there. Thus, a tiny cheese curd of truth snowballed into a cheese wheel-sized rumor that we still encounter today.
