Big Block of Cheese Day

Big Block of Cheese Day is a fictional workday on the television program The West Wing. On Big Block of Cheese Day, the White House Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, encourages his staff to take meetings with fringe special interest groups that normally would not get attention from the White House. Big Block of Cheese Day is "celebrated" in the episodes "The Crackpots and These Women" and "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail."

White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler refers to it derisively as "Throw Open Our Office Doors To People Who Want To Discuss Things That We Could Care Less About Day", and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman refers to it as "Total Crackpot Day".

Real-life inspiration
Although there has never been a real-life Big Block of Cheese Day, the inspiration for the day in the West Wing universe (as recounted by the character Leo McGarry) is that America's seventh president, Andrew Jackson, had a two-ton block of cheese in the White House foyer from which everyone was welcome to eat.

The book Real Life at the White House confirms that this story does draw on actual events. Andrew Jackson did once receive a 1,400 pound, four foot in diameter, two foot thick (635 kg, 1.2 m diameter, 60 cm thick) block of cheese as a gift. After two years of aging, he held a public "cheese tasting". The event was heavily attended and the cheese was consumed in two hours.

Issues

In episode 05, "The Crackpots and These Women," C.J. Cregg meets with a group that would like to build a highway for wolves and Sam Seaborn meets with a staffer of US Space Command concerned about UFOs.

In episode 38, "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail," Toby Ziegler meets with the fictional group "World Policies Studies," which objects to the World Trade Organization, and C.J. Cregg meets with "The Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality", which would like legislature to support a specific map projection. The fictional cartographic organization prefers the equal-area Peters World Map or Gall-Peters projection to the more common Mercator projection.

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