Hairy Cheese?

As a cheese monger I get a lot of interesting questions.
Most recently I had a man tell me that he had been to France and had eaten a cheese that had hair on it (and wanted to know if we carried it). My first thought was that some sneaky Frenchman had accidentally dropped a wedge on the floor and decided to pass it off as a delicacy to some unwitting tourist. But not wanting to burst his bubble (or make him sick),  I told him that cheese could not grow hair. He again stated that this cheese was growing hair. "Maybe it was some unique looking mold", I suggested. At this point he seemed a bit frustrated and told me that he "knows what mold looks like" and this was not. Obviously I was not going to convince this man that cheeses lack the essential follicles to grow hair, so I directed him to the French cheese section with the warning "I don't think we carry it". "That's ok", he said. "It's probably illegal here."
I hope so.
Nonetheless I was intrigued. Initially when he said "hair" I pictured the slightly longer-than-average fuzz that can occur on bloomy rinded cheeses, like I've seen on Vermont Butter and Cheese's Coupole. But after some research I found that there is a mold called poil de chat, or cat's hair mold, that looks like the tumbleweeds of cat fur that careen across the floor when Spring is near. It sometimes makes its home on cheese.
While I first found this man's question silly and (snobishly, on my part) ignorrant, I am glad he asked. Not only did I learn something new about cheese (poil de chat can be toxic by the way. If your cheese looks like your pet has been shedding on it, don't try to "save" it with scraping), it also reminded me that there is still so much to teach the public about cheese. In all of its unique forms, cheese is so much more than a cryovaced brick - it's a living food, and I think an essential part of instilling a real food culture and system in America.
Cheese is alive, yes, but still not capable of growing hair.