Cheese was, and to a degree still is, stored and distributed in wheels. As a retail buyer you rarely encounter an entire wheel, but it's definitely a common sight in wholesale.
A lot of damaged cheese was simply 1) sold in smaller pieces, as is the norm for retail distribution (1/16 or 1/32 of a whole wheel are the common sizes), or 2) routed to industrial processing to become little cheese pieces (shrinkwrapped as snacks) and pre-grated cheese.
Cheese is still sold in wheels, or slices off wheels. You just have to go to a cheesemongers, rather than the supermarket aisle :)
In fact, that's how most cheese is made in the first place: in wheels. They can be smaller, like a camembert (about 250 grams), or larger like a gruyere (that's about 40kg) but a cylinder is still the most convenient shape for any cheese harder than a cream cheese. There are some decent quality, usually semi-hard, cheeses made and sold in various kinds of oblongs though. And of course there's processed cheese which usually comes in slices, I guess.
It’s not a Monty Python thing. Some cheese is made in a wheel shape as part of the manufacturing process. If you buy some kinds of bulk cheese, you will get it in wheels. https://dibruno.com/whole-wheel-parmigiano-reggiano/
My friend worked at a cheese plant and they would let him take home 5 blocks of cheese a day as long as it wasn't packaged (employees just wrapped it in wax paper). Pretty common across all types of manufacturing.
It doesn't help that the markup on real cheese at most stores is extreme. Going to a grocery store with a flat percentage markup over wholesale on everything was pretty eye opening - cheese was much, much cheaper, and milk was actually more expensive.
I always find it fascinating when someone says they've "only recently found" something that I see even at places like gas stations and liquor stores. There's cheese EVERYWHERE in the midwest US.
Just for anyone coming to this who, like me, assumed that "IBM Cheese Cutter" was a nickname for some 1970s bit of computer hardware that hung off the side of an S/360.
This is a device for cutting big round "wheels" of cheese. It dates from the 1910s, and would have been used in retail outlets selling cheese. In those days cheese was sold wholesale in big "wheels": round blocks of cheese weighing maybe 70 or 80 lb. (High-end cheese is still sold this way, if you really want to buy that much of it).
A retail customer would ask the counter-clerk for 6 oz of Gorgonzola, and he would pull out one of these big wheels, probably with a segment already cut out for previous customers, and slice off 6 oz.
Problem: how to get exactly 6 oz first time. Customers don't want a couple of little chunks added to make up the weight, and slicing off chunks from what you cut to bring the weight back down is wasteful because nobody wants the scraps. Solution: this machine. It has a lever for setting the original weight of the wheel, and another for the weight the customer wants. A nifty bit of mechanical analogue computer underneath rotates the cheese by exactly the right amount.
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