Everyone wants to know what the future holds for them, and there have been methods for predicting it that involve any number of objects: dice, tea leaves, chicken bones, tarot cards, or molten lead. One method you may not be familiar with is tyromancy, or reading fortunes in cheese. The practice goes back at least to ancient Greece, but reached its height during the Middle Ages. You can imagine a cheesemaker promoting tyromancy in order to sell his wares. Cheese varies so much that tyromancers have divined fortunes from the veins in bleu cheese, the holes in Swiss cheese, the pattern of curds forming, which block of cheese ripens or goes moldy first, and a number of other variations. A tyromancer would look at a piece of cheese and tell you who you'll marry, or how your kids will turn out, or whether your business will succeed. The practice is not dead yet; a tyromancer explains the history of reading cheese and a bit of her recent experience in doing it at Saveur. -via Metafilter
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