9-year-old fills chapstick with cheese so she can eat in class without getting caught

A nine-year-old girl from Missouri won the internet's praise after executing an ingenious plan to tackle hunger pangs while in class. The resourceful youngster took her love for cheese to brilliant new heights by filling an empty lip balm tube with tiny circles of sharp cheddar so that she could nibble on it undetected while attending school. The child's clever mid-class snacking hack went viral on social media after her mother, Valerie Schremp Hahn, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, posted a photo of it on Twitter. "My 9-year-old daughter has taken an old lip balm tube and filled it with cheese so she can eat it in class," she wrote.

The youngster's genius creation almost instantly went viral on social media as it left Hahn's followers thoroughly impressed with the little girl's innovation. "Further confirmation that the future is female," wrote Twitter user @shelikesfacts. "Your daughter is living in 2079 and we are all still here in 2019," commented @notthegymnast. Meanwhile, one user suggested that Hahn's daughter take the whole idea a step further by picking up a few more empty tubes and making an entire meal out of it. "Shouldn't she fill one with summer sausage or a nice pepperoni?" tweeted @lauraapollo.

The official Twitter account of Dictionary.com also joined the discussion by dropping a little fact. "Balm: Anything that heals, soothes, or mitigates pain," they tweeted. Speaking to BuzzFeed News, the fourth-grader revealed that she got the idea for the pocket snack from YouTube. "I was just looking on YouTube because I was bored and I found this video and I decided to do it," the girl, whose mother asked that her name not be published, said. "I just took some of my dad’s cheese, sliced it up, and put it in the chapstick container."

The idea was reportedly part of a compilation of back-to-school pranks about sneaking food into class from the DIY life hacks YouTube channel Troom Troom. Although in the video, an empty glue stick container is used to stuff the cheese into, since the Schremp Hahn household didn't have any empty glue stick tubes laying around, the young inventor made do with the next best thing. "I just found that, cleaned it out with some soap, and started filling it with cheese," she said, adding that she used sharp cheddar from Aldi's.

The young girl revealed that she took two of her "cheese stick chapsticks" to school and managed to sneak in a few licks and bites during breaks between standardized tests. "You can lick it and no one will know," she said, adding that her friends got a kick out of it. "At first I didn't tell them and I was like licking the, quote, 'cheese,' and then I told them it was cheese and they just started laughing so hard," she said. Meanwhile, Hahn revealed on Twitter that she'd informed her daughter's teacher about the cheese tubes. The young girl, however, proved to be quite adept at hiding the sticks as her teacher later informed Hahn that they didn't notice the two tubes of cheese during class.

The school's principal was also impressed by the youngster's creativity and told Hahn that she would give her daughter a shoutout in the school's newsletter. "I was kind of surprised it took off, but people like cheese so, you know, maybe I shouldn't be surprised," said Hahn. Her young daughter shared similar sentiments. "I'm just impressed that anybody would, like, like this out of all things," the nine-year-old said, before adding that she understands why some people might be obsessed with the idea. "Cheese is amazing."