Sampling Sardinia’s legendary maggot cheese

In the soft glow of a wine-bottle lamp, the larvae were leaping. Squirming I was prepared for, having spent weeks researching and contemplating casu marzu, Sardinia’s famous maggot-infested cheese. The jumping came as a surprise. Our host, the chef at a restaurant in a Google Maps-defeating maze of medieval streets in Dorgali, a small city in the east of the island, had just produced a rough-hewn wheel of casu marzu. He carved a circle in the top and pried the thick rind off like a cap. The pungent smell of aged cheese floated through the room and, with it, a ripple of excitement. The cheese too was subtly but unmistakably rippling. And now, some of the maggots that had made it their home began abandoning ship, popping off the cheese like bubbles from a glass of ginger ale and landing in a soft pile on the wooden table. The chef took a piece of pane carasau, a regional cracker-like bread, and covered it with a healthy smear of the cheese. He held it out to me. I had been in Sardinia for all of six hours, and frankly I thought I’d have more time.

Casu marzu, which in Sardinian means “rotten cheese,” is the most common name for a cheese in which Piophila casei, the cheese fly, has been allowed to lay its eggs and those eggs have been allowed to hatch. The larvae then eat, digest, and excrete the cheese, leaving it with a distinctive creaminess and the appearance of a well-furrowed field. The resulting product is an object of both deep pride within Sardinian culture and fascination outside it.

There are, of course, many Sardinian specialties that do not contain maggots. In the hilly interior city of Nuoro, you find su filindeu, the “threads of God,” a pasta that has been pulled into gossamer strands, woven into a lattice, and served in warming bowls of fragrant mutton broth. In the capital, Cagliari, you dive into bowls of nubbly fregola, studded with clams and showered with saffron-colored bottarga. There is wine: savory red Cannonau and crisp white Vermentino. There is olive oil so radiant that it somehow made the steamed cauliflower I had at one lunch seem more luxurious than the glistening platter of roast pork it was served next to. And if you want to talk cheese, Sardinia is practically perfumed with the stuff, most of it notably insect free. But “Man Bites Cheese” isn’t a story. “Cheese Bites Man,” on the other hand…

This is why if you know one food associated with the Mediterranean’s second largest island, it’s likely casu marzu, the reason Anthony Bourdain ate the cheese on camera and that, in recent years, TikTok and Instagram are filled with the giggles and shrieks of visitors trying what Guiness World Records calls the “world’s most dangerous” cheese. It’s also why I was standing in the restaurant in Dorgali, momentarily questioning my life choices.

I took the proffered piece of casu marzu and, like a skydiver forcing himself to step out of a plane, popped it in my mouth before I could think any more about it. The flavor was strong and goaty, but not as searingly intense as, say, some Spanish cheeses that make you feel as though you’ve climbed inside a goat. It had a bold barnyard tang that simultaneously dried out my tongue and set my salivary glands into overdrive. There was no identifiable sensation of eating insects. Still, I chewed extra thoroughly, lest any guests make it down the pipe unmasticated. Theoretically, a maggot could survive the gastrointestinal tract and wreak havoc, though my gastroenterologist had given me his amused blessing before I departed.

(The Roman emperor who died from eating too much cheese.)

For all of Sardinia’s reputation as a wealthy playground of sparkling seas and mega-yachts, the island remains at its heart a kingdom of shepherds, their ancient work crucial to both the island’s economy and its cultural identity. Sardinia makes cheese: dozens of varieties of the stuff, including some 90 percent of the world’s Pecorino Romano. And where there is cheese, there are flies. It has been the island’s particular genius to turn natural spoilage into a work of culinary art.

The tradition is generally believed to go back centuries, at least. Today casu marzu remains deeply stitched into the social fabric of Sardinian life. At a summer picnic someone might bring homemade wine, another honey from a beehive, and somebody a wheel of maggot cheese. Some Sardinians will spin you a story that it’s an aphrodisiac, others that it contributes to the so-called blue zones diet credited with the preponderance of long-lived people on the island. But the truth is that many of them just really love it.

In 1962, Italian legislation prohibited commercial sales of the cheese due to safety concerns. Further restrictions in a wider 2002 law banned casu marzu trade within the European Union. Still, it remains available for Sardinians who know where to look. Between its underground status and the fact that production happens on a microscale, it’s difficult to pinpoint the number of shepherds making casu marzu, though one estimate suggests they churn out more than 200,000 pounds yearly. That the process relies on a certain amount of randomness—some shepherds will end up with a surplus of wheels in a given season, some none—gives the annual search a certain frantic thrill.

One night in Cala Gonone, a seaside resort not far from Dorgali, I stopped by a beach bar called Baby Luna to visit its co-owner, Giuseppe Ventura, one of the area’s most passionate casu marzu devotees. Sure enough, I had barely sat down at a table when Ventura joined me, opening a bottle of Cannonau and plopping down a plate of cheese that wiggled faintly in the Mediterranean breeze. Ventura told me he has the contacts of 10 shepherds that he calls in rotation, the better to ensure a regular supply for his personal use.

Among them is 32-year-old Mario Nieddu, the fourth generation in his family to raise farm animals in the hills near Cala Gonone. I could hear his flock before I saw it, a cacophony of bleating and bells that came from beyond a screen of scrabbly juniper and holm oak. We sat on a boulder in the shade of an olive tree, looking out on the landscape covered in fragments of limestone, as though a giant had come by with a hammer. Far below, we could see a sparkling blue piece of the Gulf of Orosei. It was the kind of view that made people, when I told them that I was going to Sardinia to eat maggot cheese, recoil, then stop, think for a moment, and say, “You know, I’d probably eat maggot cheese if I could go to Sardinia.”

It’s a fragile time for casu marzu. Increasingly hot summers because of climate change have affected the life cycle of cheese flies, making their work even less predictable than usual. Last year, out of about 60 wheels, only four or five of the Nieddu family’s ended up as casu marzu. (If the maggots inside a cheese are dead, it is considered inedible.)

That said, there are ways of encouraging the casu marzu accident. Some cheesemakers will put a fly-ridden wheel in the center of a circle of unoccupied cheeses, the way parents once hosted chickenpox parties.

Few are more reliable at producing the cheese than second-generation shepherd Andrea Logias. Dogs barked furiously as I approached his farm in Sorgono, a small commune in the mountainous central province of Nuoro. The shepherd, a bespectacled man in his late 40s, shooed them away.

Logias has about 150 sheep, three dogs, and at least two cats that like to hang out on the roof of his cheese-aging room—which was blackened with smoke stains. The air was thick with flies. Wheels of cheese weighing between six and nine pounds were stacked everywhere, and clumps of maggots lay on the floor. These larvae would form cocoons, metamorphose, and then reemerge as flies to begin the process again. They too are multigenerational artisans. Logias, who sells the cheese to his neighbors, compared the process to farfalle. “Butterflies,” the translator interpreted. In other words, imagine that room filled with butterflies.

Broadly speaking, this is how all cheese is made, with various living organisms—bacteria, yeast, mold—transforming simple milk into a kaleidoscopic array of manifestations, some of them among the world’s most sublime foodstuffs. It just happens that the organisms digesting casu marzu are significantly larger and more visibly active.

(This tasty piece of cheese may give you nightmares—literally.)

Outside Sardinia, casu marzu has a place among such other hall-of-fame gastronomic oddities as the Icelandic rotten shark known as hákarl, and kopi luwak, Indonesian coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of a civet.

These foods are stars of the sector of social media you might call YuckTok. But a fervid interest in being grossed out is hardly a new phenomenon. It is, in fact, deeply human, according to food psychologist Paul Rozin, who once described how the emotion of disgust evolves from what Charles Darwin identified as a mechanism designed to prevent humans from eating deadly foods into something more deeply tied to things like identity or morality. Dubbed the “king of disgust” for his pioneering work on that emotion, Rozin tells me: “It’s a feature of humans that we like to overcome aversions, and we become attached to things that are, for most people, offensive.”

It would not be inaccurate to dismiss much of the internet’s casu marzu content as superficial and sensationalistic. “It’s a bad approach to somebody else’s culture,” says Roberto Flore, a Sardinian who now runs DTU Skylab Foodlab in Copenhagen and co-authored the book On Eating Insects. “It doesn’t have to be ‘disgusting.’ It could [just] be ‘unusual.’”

Laura Mereu, whose family runs Agri­turismo Su Connoto, a farm near Sorgono that hosts tastings of local products, likes the fact that Sardinian culture is celebrated by the TikTok cheese-eaters but wonders about the cost. “They give the cheese the right level of importance,” she said. “But they lose the meaning.”

Mereu showed me something that she thought was an essential part of the casu marzu picture. We drove outside of Sorgono to a wooded area, took a short walk past pastures and stands of cork trees, and came upon a clearing in which a straight line of ancient stones stuck out of the ground like mossy thumbs. Nearby was a nuraghe, an edifice of piled stones, like a miniature castle, crumbling and overgrown but still in good enough repair that we were able to wander through its archways and up its staircase. These were remnants of the Nuraghi, the Bronze Age civilization that flourished on Sardinia nearly two millennia before Julius Caesar.

There are thousands of such sites strewn across Sardinia, many that you can simply pull off the road to wander. Nobody knows how many remain undiscovered, Mereu said, because even in dig-happy Italy, many have gone relatively unstudied. For Sardinians, they are a powerful reminder both of the depth of their history and of their separateness from the rest of Italy. Mereu sees casu marzu as a similarly important and irreplaceable link: “It is part of a specific food tradition tied to rural life, identity, and memory.”

On my last night in Sardinia, I dined with two professors of microbiology from the University of Sassari: Severino Zara and Francesco Fancello. We were at Sa Mandra, a sprawling agriturismo near the city of Alghero that is part farm, part restaurant, and part folkloric tourist attraction.

A few years ago, Zara began poking around for scientific literature on casu marzu and was shocked at how little there was. “There is a lot of folklore around casu marzu, but not a lot of research,” he said, as we scooped up spoonfuls of Pecorino-laced whipped potatoes and wild boar in a sauce of green chard. Both men agreed that the lack of study was regrettable—particularly on the cheese fly larva itself. For all we know, they said, it might actually be healthy for humans. “It’s such a robust little biome,” Fancello said.

A decade ago, an entomologist colleague began a study that aimed to produce casu marzu under safe laboratory conditions, but nothing seemed to have come of it. The men speculated that there was little funding for casu marzu research, the problem being that there is no problem: Casu marzu makers are making casu marzu, casu marzu lovers are finding casu marzu, and so peace reigns.

It reminded me that nobody I had met in my time on the island could remember anybody being arrested, fined, or otherwise inconvenienced in relation to this so-called illegal cheese. In 2024, a petition to legalize casu marzu was sent to the European Parliament, proposing rules and safety regulations, “thus safeguarding consumers’ health and safety.” It was summarily rejected on the grounds that the cheese was a “contaminated and decayed product.”

In truth, I had the sense that few Sardinians minded: The wink, the handshake, the gleam in the eye—all seemed to be part and parcel of what they loved about casu marzu.

For Fancello, it was a bit of a dilemma. As a scientist, he knew a controlled product would be easier to study. As one of seven children of a Dorgali shepherd, he felt that wildness was the very essence of the cheese. “To produce casu marzu, you need freedom,” he said. The great divide, as he sees it, isn’t between casu marzu and maggot-free cheeses. It is between cheeses made by hand in shepherds’ huts and cheeses mass-produced in factories—between artisanship and mass production.

Our meal ended with seadas, deep-fried pies filled with cheese and honey. We toasted with shots of a sweet Sardinian myrtle liqueur called mirto. Then we proceeded outside, where a wheel of casu marzu had been opened. By now, I didn’t even hesitate before taking a bite. Casu marzu, I had come to see, represents authenticity, artisanship, place, and community. In the face of all that, what’s a few maggots between new friends?

(What’s in the world’s oldest cheese? These mummies are giving up their secrets.)