The Everyday Food That's Illegal To Eat In Tampa, Florida After 6 P.M.

Hey Florida, why are you so weird? What with your gator wraslin', Everglades hovercraft tours, track-suited elderly communities, drunk dudes punching animatronic Chuck E. Cheese dolls, obsession with Publix grocery stores and their subs, infinite supply of hostile mosquitos, cluttered beaches where leather-skinned retirees wearing banana hammocks stroll amongst throngs of Instagram influencer hopefuls working their best poses against the backdrop of the sand and the sea, and plenty of lunatic behavior likely to get attention on social media and news outlets. Well, sometimes actual laws outstrip even the strangeness of Floridian stereotypes (that might be at least 50% true). Case in point: Hands off the cottage cheese while in the Sunshine State, at least after 6 p.m. on Sunday.

Yes, it really is the case that there's a weird law in Florida about not eating cottage cheese past 6 p.m. on Sunday. But, as sites like Rubino Law attest, it's a law in Tampa and not anywhere else. So if you're hankering for your cottage cheese fix at 11:37 p.m. on Sunday and don't want the cops to catch you sneakily chowing down on Breakstone's or whatever in the darkness of your kitchen, you can always take a 90-minute drive to Orlando and dig in past 1 a.m. on Monday. So is it still illegal at that point in Orlando? Does the illegality of eating cottage cheese on Sunday flip back off come midnight on Monday? Listen, of course these laws don't make any sense and we have no idea — no one does. But like many other ridiculous laws in Florida and elsewhere, it's still on the books.

Tampa's cottage cheese law is far from the only odd Floridian law. As The Law Place explains, other odd laws include no falling asleep under a hair dryer (at a salon or otherwise), singing while wearing a bathing suit, hanging your clothes outside in Cape Coral, and, uh ... being a man and wearing a "strapless gown in public" (loopholes abound, no doubt). Also, you can't parachute on Sunday while being a woman and unmarried. Additionally, Casanova Law PA cites selling ice cream in a graveyard as illegal. Yes, maybe Florida really is as silly as we all think.

But about that cottage cheese law: Why, oh why, you ask, would it be illegal to eat cottage cheese at all, let alone in Tampa, let alone on Sunday, and let alone after 6 p.m.? Sorry to disappoint, but no one knows and (presumably) those who enacted the law have been dead for multiple generations. 

Because the law focuses on Sunday, maybe it's a religious thing? As Exodus 23:19 reads: "Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk." Okay, maybe not. Could it be related to health hazards circa early pasteurization processes following scientist Louis Pasteur's 1860's work? Florida became a state in 1845, and maybe — refrigeration limitations being what they were (and Floridian heat) — there was a rash of people sick on cheese, but hospitals weren't open on Sunday evenings because of Christian-related laws or customs, and ... Yeah, no clue.   

So folks might be wondering if anyone has ever actually been arrested for eating cottage cheese after 6 p.m. on Sunday in Tampa. Surprise, surprise: The answer seems to be "no." Or at least, there's no record of Tampa police valiantly devoting departmental resources to hunting down rogue cheese gobblers in the night. This is a good thing because judging by the stories Florida police seem pretty needed elsewhere. 

Plenty of people have raised the question of illegal cottage cheese in online forums. One Facebook post from 2012 provoked disbelief in the comment section, including one person vowing to proudly proclaim that if he was arrested for eating cottage cheese he'd happily tell people that he was arrested for eating cottage cheese. The law has gotten cited on Instagram and TikTok, as well, with one user on the latter site saying what everyone else is thinking: "I always wonder what happened that made these laws need to be written in the first place." And then there's a Reddit thread of Christians discussing the apparent sinfulness (in the religious/theological sense) of breaking this particular manmade law, or whether it hovers in the trivial "I'm driving 80 miles per hour in a 70 mile-per-hour" range of no-nos. 

Also, there's a difference between being able to eat cottage cheese after 6 p.m. and being able to buy it. Some states, like Connecticut, used to ban selling alcohol on Sunday, but you could still drink it. Presumably, Florida stores still sell cottage cheese on Sunday evenings and nights. Tsk tsk.