“If you hear anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong ’uns.”
These are not the words of Under The Counter, but of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, commenting on the theft of 22 tonnes of artisan cheddar from Neal’s Yard Dairy.
UTC isn’t entirely sure if ‘theft’ is the right word to use though, given that Neal’s Yard was good enough to deliver it to some bloke wider than Jamie Oliver’s coupon, who was posing as a French wholesaler.
Far from being not worth a curdy, the 950 cloth-wrapped wheels of Hafod Welsh, Westcombe and Pitchfork cheddars sell for up to £715 for a 250g piece. Which is a lot of wedge. Or isn’t, depending on whether you’re talking about the money or the amount of cheese you get for it.
The total haul is worth up to £300,000 and appears to have melted away, most likely to the Middle East or Russia, possibly at the behest of some criminal mastermind that the Auld Boy has dubbed ‘The Ched-czar’.
Police in the UK have already made an arrest. This was not, as UTC hoped, of Jamie Oliver for the heinous crime of naming his two daughters Poppy Honey Rosie and Daisy Boo Pamela, but of a 63-year-old man on suspicion of fraud by false representation.
Grate news for the plod. However, there is no truth whatsoever in the rumour that the suspect is on his whey to a courtroom appearance before Judge Rinder.
