The Most Shoplifted Item In the World

What do you think is the most stolen item in the world?

Jewelry? It’s valuable and seems easy to conceal…

Booze? It’s available all over and some folks are desperate for it…

Gold bars? Okay, maybe I watch too many pirate and bank heist movies.

Well, if you thought it was any of these things, you were wrong. The most shoplifted item in the entire world is:

CHEESE

While it seems to me that you could get your hands on more cheese with a gold bar in your pocket (stop it with the pirates already), it otherwise makes a lot of sense. My love of cheese is well-documented, and apparently, I’m not alone.

People are so desperate for the tangy goodness of cheese, they are willing to lie, cheat, and steal for it. Plus, it’s probably easier to conceal than roasted chicken.

I guess the great anti-dairy movement hasn’t been as successful as its advocates would like. Maybe it’s the “got milk” ads, but frankly, I’m surprised cheese needs any marketing. It’s incredibly delicious.

Now kale promotion, I get. Kale tastes horrible.

I keep reading about how fantastic kale is for you, how it will turn back the clock and do your laundry for you. People say it’s delicious, but I keep buying these so-called delicious kale chips then staring at them like they’re fried cockroaches.

I can only eat kale in morning smoothies because you can’t tell it’s there. I’m suspicious of the idea that Mother Nature intended us to eat kale anyway. Why would it taste so awful to us, if she did?

Cheese, on the other hand, tastes like the feet of angels.

And I’m not sure why everyone is claiming lactose intolerance all of a sudden. Yes, I get that some people are legitimately lactose intolerant… their bellies make it obvious. It especially makes sense in Asian populations because dairy hasn’t historically been part of the Asian diet, so lactose-intolerance wouldn’t have been weeded out of the gene pool.

But Europeans? We’ve been eating the stuff for thousands of years. It may even have cancer-fighting properties.

Still, we’ve been hit with much anti-dairy propaganda of late. A lot of cheese opponents, for example, like to point out that we’re the only animals that drink milk past infancy and harvest the milk of another species.

True enough, but we’re also the only animal that drives, uses air-conditioning and practices modern dentistry.

I bet plenty of other animals would eat cheese too if they could just figure out how to milk cows. It would probably be a high priority item, right after toilet paper.

And it’s tasty enough that people want to steal it more often than anything else.

Maybe organized crime should be expanding into dairy ventures. We could have cheese pirates, or a cheese mafia. They could specialize in aged vs soft cheeses to avoid a full-blown turf war.

I think I may have a business proposal.