The human foot and the limburger cheese do have something in common - a genus of bacteria. Brevibacterium epidermidis is the stuff that crawls around between your toes, stinking your sock up. Brevibacterium linens is a type of "smear bacteria," the bacteria that produces the rind on soft, smelly cheeses. It can't survive without oxygen, so it only grows on the surface of cheese. It also needs a moist and salty environment, and since cheeses don't produce foot sweat cheesemakers have to wash these cheeses with water to keep them wet. This is why they're called "washed rind cheeses." On the moist cheese, the B. linens chew through proteins to produce volatile fatty acids, which is the stuff we might not love to smell but that we do love to eat.