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Food

05th Mar 2018

Big cheese festival runs out of cheese and everyone loses their damn minds

How has it come to this?

Kyle Picknell

It was like The Purge, but at a cheese festival in East Sussex, and way more violent.

(It wasn’t at all like The Purge)

Say if you were a cheese festival organiser, as in, that was your job, to plan and organise cheese festivals, big ones, what would you say was your number one priority? Just off the cuff. No pressure, just your immediate response to becoming a cheese festival organiser and being in charge of a cheese festival. What do you think you’d need to do? Like first steps. What would be your first bullet point on your jotter? Number one thing. Would it be cheese? Yeah. I think so. It’d probably be cheese wouldn’t it. It’d have to be. You’d probably need a lot of cheese. Loads of it. I think that would be a good place to start.

Organisers at The Big Cheese Festival in Brighton – that was the actual name yeah – somehow didn’t manage to do this. They ran out of cheese. They actually ran out of cheese. At The Big Cheese Festival. They’ve had to offer everyone refunds and everything. It was £22 a ticket, and they didn’t have enough cheese. Makes you sick thinking about.

The event had promised cheese-lovers “a plethora of the finest international cheesemakers and mongers showcasing their amazing cheeses” whilst only delivering five stalls selling samples of cheese. Five stalls. At The Big Cheese Festival.  In Brighton. You’re better off taking some mates down to the chilled goods at Tesco. You could genuinely get a lot of cheese for twenty quid. You’d get chest pains after. But still.

The general public, understandably, were not impressed by the betrayal. And I think you can call it that. That’s what it was. A betrayal of trust, a betrayal of hope and above all else, a betrayal of cheese.

If there’s one thing people in this country to be passionate about, it’s cheese. It’s not politics, it’s not football, it’s not queueing, it’s not tea, it’s not being passive aggressive on public transport. If you look deep within our collective hearts you will find that it is molten cheese not blood pumping. This is what we care about. This is all we know.

In future cheese festival organisers, a job you clearly don’t deserve, please make sure you deliver the cheese. That’s we all ask. Don’t do it again. The people have spoken.