When is Cheddar more than cheese, or water more than wet?

When it’s in a pension fund, of course.

As companies struggle to close the gaps between what they owe to their pension funds and what they think they can pay, they are in some cases turning to unusual assets that they hope will make up part of the difference.

For example, Dairy Crest, one of Britain’s biggest producers of dairy products, said Friday that it would add £60 million, or $92 million, worth of Cheddar cheese to its pension fund. That is about 20,000 tons of cheese, or 40 percent of its current maturing cheese inventory, the company said. (It will be constantly replaced as it ages.)

Diageo, the maker of Johnnie Walker whisky, moved two million barrels of maturing whisky at its distilleries in Scotland to its pension fund in 2010.

In the United States, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which takes over both the assets and the liabilities of failing pension plans, encounters all kinds of peculiar assets. It has taken possession of water rights in the Mojave Desert, diamonds, oil wells, a hog-slaughtering facility, a restaurant, a hyperbaric chamber, a brewery in Philadelphia, a lien on a terminal at Kennedy International Airport and a stake in a nuclear fuel-reconditioning partnership.