Life — January 9, 1913 — page 55: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirical cartoon mocks the expansion of pure food inspection regulations. It depicts an imaginary lunar factory producing green cheese—a whimsical reference to the old myth that the moon is made of cheese. The scene shows inspectors, storage tanks labeled "Color Tanks," a "Milky Way Receiver," and workers at a "Souring Vat," all operating on the moon's surface. The joke suggests that food safety regulations have become so extensive and absurd that they've reached comical extremes—even extending to fictional moon-based cheese production. This likely satirizes early 20th-century American food safety legislation (possibly the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act), critiquing regulatory overreach by pushing the concept to its logical absurdity: if inspections are this comprehensive, why not inspect the moon's cheese factories too?