According to TSA you should have made a special trip to UPS or similar and paid extra for them to pack and ship your cheese board, even though you had room in your carryon and it'd be an inconvenience for you to both spend more money and find a shipping location in an unfamiliar city, in order to transit something you have reason to believe is completely benign.
(Actually, let's add that you should actually pay to ship everything you had planned to carry with you, since the TSA is apparently utterly unable a goodly portion of the time to distinguish normal household items from explosives, despite having spent a billion dollars on technology. Of course, your household has unlimited funds to accomplish this, and new TSA procedures for package screenings - recently resulting in weeks-long delays for international shipments - are not a factor here.)
Your tax dollars at work, folks...
[xpost with Scubatooth]
I know, right?? Which was why I was surprised to read you'd had little trouble carrying gear when I've personally experienced towering amounts of hassle for carrying nothing that's very exotic (right off the shelf Scubapro BCD and reg, standard mask, wetsuit, Nikon SLR and lenses...)
Usually I put my reg and computer in my carryon. That stuff is life support equipment. I'm simply not going to hand it off to anyone who's not a registered Scubapro technician or who isn't otherwise prepared to accept legal liability for any potential malfunction. It doesn't EVER leave my possession outside those circumstances, and I carry it with me to ensure some handler doesn't throw it or dump it under 50 tons of crap in the cargo hold.
Gee, it'd make me feel MUCH better while experiencing a free-flowing regulator under 100 feet of water to know that I'd followed TSA suggested practices by letting some unknown shipper handle my breathing apparatus outside my direct supervision.
(Usually my issues have been with my carryon, but I've occasionally been made to exhume and assemble my underwater camera housing from my checked bags. It's really fun when I'm getting hassled for my reg, dive lights, batteries and housing all at the same time, since apparently it's a capital offense to decide to go scuba diving on vacation....
And no, I'm not renting scuba gear on location. It's risky, and having actually had a regulator malfunction at depth, I'm not eager to repeat the experience.)