Butter Was Always Worth Taking

In the summer of 2022, Asda began putting security tags on butter.

Not on the whisky. Not on the razor blades. On a block of churned cream, sat in a chiller, fitted with a plastic clip because too many people were walking out with it. Lurpak was past nine pounds a kilo in Iceland that month and nearly the same in Tesco. The photographs went round the internet for a fortnight and everybody had a laugh about the state of the country, and then everybody moved on, because a joke about expensive butter is easier to sit with than the thing the joke is telling you.

Butter is valuable. It has been valuable for four thousand years. It has been buried like treasure, paid as rent, graded like a commodity on an exchange floor, rationed by the state, stockpiled by the state, and copied by an industry that made a great deal of money from the copy. The one period in all of that when we agreed it was worthless is the period most of my readers grew up in.

Pull a lump of butter out of an Irish peat bog after two thousand years and it is still, chemically, butter. Waxy, pale, a bit cheesy, and edible enough that the archaeologists who found it kept eating it. Nothing else in your kitchen does that. Leave bread a week. Leave a bag of salad four days. Fat does not rot the way the rest of the larder rots, and that single property is why butter became money, and why it still belongs on your plate.

Buried treasure

Bog butter is exactly what it sounds like. Great waxy deposits of it, white to yellow, pulled out of the peat of Ireland and Scotland, usually packed into a carved wooden keg or wrapped in an animal bladder before it went in the ground. Over five hundred separate finds are on record.

In 2019 a team from Bristol and University College Dublin ran compound-specific isotope analysis on thirty-two Irish examples and settled a long argument. Twenty-six of the thirty-two came back as dairy fat. Butter, then, and not tallow. The radiocarbon dates run from roughly 1700 BC to the seventeenth century AD. Three and a half thousand years of people making butter and burying it, without a break, on the same islands, in the same ground.

One keg from Morvern in Argyllshire came out from under four and a half feet of peat, carved from a single trunk, two feet long. A find from County Kildare weighed close to thirty pounds and dated to around 300 BC. Thirty pounds. That is a serious quantity of milk fat, put deliberately into a hole by somebody who fully intended to come back for it.

Nobody is certain why they buried it. Preservation is the obvious answer, and a peat bog is a superb one: cold, acidic, no oxygen, the reason the bodies come out with their fingerprints intact. Some archaeologists argue for offerings. Some point out that several of the kegs are centuries older than the butter inside them, which means the containers were being handed down through families like a good pan.

The interesting part is that both explanations say the same thing about the butter. You do not bury what you can replace. You do not give the gods your leftovers. You bury the wealth.

And the record backs it up right through the medieval period. Butter was paid as rent and as tribute across Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia, because it was one of the few things a farm produced that could be stored, transported, valued and taxed. A cow gives you milk that is finished in two days. Churn it and salt it and you have an asset that survives a winter, a journey and a landlord.

Rouen went further and built a tower out of it. The Tour de Beurre went up on the west front of the cathedral between 1485 and 1506 and cost 24,750 livres tournois, and it is called the Butter Tower to this day. Dispensations to eat butter during Lent were a real and documented business in that part of France, sold to people who did not fancy forty days without it. A city named a piece of Gothic architecture after a dairy product, and the name stuck for five hundred years, which tells you roughly how much the dairy product mattered.

The block itself

For most of its history butter was an object before it was an ingredient, and the object took work.

Cream separated overnight, then agitated: in a plunge churn, in a barrel with a crank, in a jar in the arms of whoever was smallest and had least say in the matter. Forty minutes of it, sometimes an hour, until the emulsion broke and the fat came together in grains. Then the buttermilk poured off, the grains washed in cold water, worked with wooden pats to drive the last of the moisture out, and salted.

The salt is the technology. Butter with no salt in it and no fridge to sit in gives you a few days in summer. Salt it properly and you have months. Every buried keg, every firkin that went to market, every pound that paid a rent was salted, because without salt butter is a perishable and with salt it is a store of value.

Then there is the colour, which is the part people have forgotten how to read. Summer butter, from a cow out on green grass, is deep yellow. That colour is beta-carotene coming through the grass into the milk fat, along with the fat-soluble vitamins that travel with it. Winter butter, from a cow on hay in a shed, is pale, sometimes almost white. Two blocks on the same slab, visibly different, and the yellow one cost more. Everybody in the market knew why. You could see the summer in it.

The industry now dyes winter butter with annatto so that nobody has to look at the difference, which is a small and perfect example of how this all went.

And it lived on the table. A covered dish, sat out at room temperature, refilled from the block, present at every meal and helped liberally. Not a portioned foil rectangle handed over with the bread in a restaurant. Not a tub in the fridge door hardened to the density of a paving slab. A dish, on the table, with a knife in it, from which you took as much as you wanted.

The exchange, and who got which butter

For a thousand years butter was local, because it had to be. The cold chain changed that inside two generations. Ice houses, then mechanical refrigeration from the 1870s, then refrigerated rail wagons and refrigerated ships. Butter stopped being a thing your parish made and became a thing that could be graded in one country and eaten in another.

Cork is the case study. The Cork Butter Exchange opened in 1769 and by the middle of the nineteenth century was the largest butter market in the world. Farmers brought butter down from Kerry and West Cork in eighty-pound firkins, on foot and by cart, along roads still called butter roads. At the Exchange, inspectors opened every firkin and graded the contents from first to sixth quality on colour, texture, salt and smell. That grade set the price, and the price went to Liverpool, London, Lisbon, Rio and Calcutta. The Exchange ran until 1924.

Six men, tasting butter, setting the value of a nation’s dairy exports. Whatever else that is, it is not the treatment given to a food nobody rates.

And with grading comes class, which is where the story starts to bite. Good butter went up the table. The best of it went to the houses that could afford it and to the export markets that paid for it, and what was left at the bottom of the scale went where the money was not. Below butter came dripping, and lard, and eventually margarine.

There was no confusion about the hierarchy. A family who could afford butter ate butter. A family who could not ate the substitute and knew precisely what they were eating and why. My grandmother’s generation could have told you the price of a pound of butter to the penny and could have told you exactly what it meant when a household stopped buying it.

The Office for National Statistics has been recording the average price of a 250g block of home-produced butter since 1914. It was seventeen pence in 1975 and fifty-two in 1986. A shopper today pays around two pounds for the same block. The number has been climbing for half a century because the thing has been worth having for half a century, and 2022 was not an aberration. It was the trend arriving at a security tag.

The copy arrives, and admits it is a copy

In 1869 a French chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès patented a cheap fat that could stand in for butter. He was answering a competition: the French state wanted something to feed the armed forces and the poor, because butter was expensive and there was not enough of it to go round. He built his substitute from beef tallow, skimmed milk and water, called it oleomargarine, and won.

Nobody asked for something better than butter. Nobody suggested butter was harmful. The state asked for a cheap imitation for people who could not afford the real thing, which is an admission of butter’s value written into the founding document of its replacement.

Mège-Mouriès sold the patent on. The Dutch firm of Jurgens took it up, went into production, and grew into one of the two companies that merged in 1929 to form Unilever. Every subsequent step of this story runs through that lineage.

America’s response is the part nobody teaches. The dairy states saw the substitute coming and fought it in law, and they fought dirty and won for sixty years. The federal Margarine Act of 1886 put a tax on the stuff and forced manufacturers to license and label it. Individual states went further and banned it from being coloured yellow, on the grounds that yellow was butter’s appearance and selling a copy in the original’s clothes was a fraud. Margarine went into the shops white, the colour of lard, and manufacturers sold a little capsule of dye with it so the housewife could knead the colour in at home if she wanted.

Then several states passed the pink laws. New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia and South Dakota required by statute that margarine be dyed pink before sale. Not left white. Made pink. The reasoning was that no household would put a pink fat on the table by accident, and the intent was to make the imitation unsellable by making it look like what it was.

The Supreme Court struck the pink laws down. The taxes and the colour bans hung on far longer. Wisconsin, the last holdout, did not permit the sale of yellow margarine until 1967, and the legislature only lost after a decade of border runs and smuggling that people there still find funny.

In 1967 the American dairy heartland was still legally treating margarine as a counterfeit. By then the British medical establishment had already been recommending it for years.

The inversion

Two things had to happen for the copy to beat the original, and they happened in the right order.

The first was chemistry. Raw margarine was soft, greasy and unconvincing. Hydrogenation fixed it: run hydrogen through liquid oil with a metal catalyst, and the oil hardens. Suddenly a manufacturer could take the cheapest liquid fat available and dial it to whatever consistency he liked, spreadable straight from the fridge, stable for months, shaped and packed on a production line. What the process also did was produce trans fats, in quantity, throughout the product, for the next several decades, in the fat that was about to be sold to the nation as the healthy option. The industry took until the 2000s to take them back out.

The second was permission.

Unilever did not talk the medical profession into margarine. The medical profession asked Unilever for it.

By the early 1960s the cholesterol hypothesis was hardening into consensus and doctors wanted something to tell patients to use instead of butter and lard. There was no such product on a British shelf. So the request went to the company that already made the substitute, and the company that already made the substitute went away and built exactly what had been ordered.

Flora went into test in Bolton and Brighton in 1964 and national in 1968. It was made from sunflower oil, high in polyunsaturates, and it was sold on that basis from the first advertisement. The September 1964 copy offered the reader the lighter, healthier way you want to eat today.

That is the hinge of the entire century. A firm with a commercial interest in replacing butter was invited by the medical establishment to produce the replacement, and then permitted to sell it as health. Doctors did not fall for the marketing. Doctors commissioned the product and the marketing followed.

What happened next happened fast, and my readers watched it happen in their own kitchens. Inside twenty years the order of the table flipped completely. Butter went from the thing you bought when you could afford it to the thing you bought if nobody had told you yet. Margarine went from the poor family’s compromise to the informed household’s choice. The tub in the fridge door became a small daily signal that you were a person who kept up.

There is a woman in my inbox most weeks, seventy or thereabouts, who spent thirty years buying tubs. She scraped it thin on her toast because it was still fat and fat was still the enemy. She trimmed the meat. She binned the yolks. She did every single thing she was told by people she had no reason to distrust, and she got heavier and more tired every decade, and at no point did anyone come back and say sorry.

She is not the mark for a joke. She was the mark for a product.

The paradox they could not explain away

While Britain was switching, France carried on eating butter at a rate that ought to have flattened the population.

France eats around eight kilos of butter a head a year, the highest in the world, twice the European average and something like three times the American figure. Switzerland sits in the top five. Both countries eat cream, both eat aged cheese, and neither has ever shown the faintest interest in being told to stop.

In 1992 Serge Renaud and Michel de Lorgeril put the problem into The Lancet and gave it a name. The French were eating a great deal of saturated fat and they were not dying of heart disease at anything like the rate the hypothesis required. It went into the world’s most respected medical journal as a paradox, which is what a discipline calls a result when it does not intend to follow it.

The response was wine. Within months everybody had agreed the French were saved by claret, and a generation of research went off after resveratrol, and the shelves filled with red wine extract capsules. Switzerland was not much discussed, presumably because it is harder to build a wine story around a country that eats that much butter and cheese and posts some of the best cardiovascular numbers in Europe anyway.

The pattern is not confined to two countries. A 2016 analysis compared food consumption against cardiovascular disease across forty-two European nations and found the strongest dietary correlate of low cardiovascular risk was high total fat and animal protein intake. The strongest correlate of high risk was the share of energy coming from carbohydrate. Forty-two countries, decades of data, pointing the opposite way to the advice.

The paradox was never a paradox. It was a result, filed under paradox because the alternative was admitting the hypothesis had failed in public.

The state at war with itself

Britain rationed butter for fourteen years.

It began on 8 January 1940, with bacon and sugar, the first three foods in the country to go on the ration. Four ounces a week, cut to two at the worst of it. Two ounces. A modern block is nine. Rationing did not fully end until 4 July 1954, which is nine years after the war it was introduced for.

Thirty-two years later the same continent had 1,323,000 tonnes of butter sat in cold stores, bought up under the Common Agricultural Policy and going nowhere. One and a third million tonnes. By December 1988 the pile had been run down to around 146,000 tonnes, sold off cheap, dumped on foreign markets, turned into animal feed.

Within one lifetime the state went from prosecuting people for having too much butter to storing it by the million tonne while its own health departments told the public to stop eating it. The same institutions that could not get two ounces a week into a British kitchen after the war could not give the stuff away in 1986.

Nobody involved has ever been asked to reconcile those two positions, because nobody is required to.

Butter is blameless, and it is yours

Strip out the century of politics and you are left with a block of concentrated milk fat, roughly eighty per cent fat, made by agitating cream until it changes its mind.

In it: vitamin A in the form your body actually uses, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K2, which is close to absent from a modern diet and which is not in the low-fat version because it cannot be, since removing the fat removes the fat-soluble vitamins by definition. Butyrate, the short-chain fat your colon runs on, named after butter. Conjugated linoleic acid. Cholesterol, which your brain is partly built from and which your body makes anyway because it will not go without.

And energy. Butter is the densest, cleanest, most immediately usable energy available in any ordinary shop, and it arrives with no sugar, no insulin spike, no crash at four in the afternoon and no argument.

This is why the satiety works, and satiety is the thing my readers notice first. A meal with proper fat on it finishes. You put your knife down and the subject is closed for six or seven hours. A meal built on lean protein and carbohydrate does not finish. It idles, and it goes on asking, and two hours later you are in the cupboard telling yourself you have no willpower, when what you actually have is a plate that never contained enough fat to end the conversation.

Butter is not a thing to be permitted in small amounts. It is the ingredient that makes the rest of the meal work, and the correct quantity is more than you are currently using.

Bringing it back

Most people who think they cannot tolerate dairy have only ever tried one kind of it, and the block of supermarket butter is the least of the options.

Start with the ordinary block, because for the large majority nothing further is needed. Butter is almost pure fat and carries very little lactose or casein, which is why plenty of people who cannot manage a glass of milk have no trouble with it at all. Salted or unsalted makes no difference to anything that matters here. Buy whichever you like the taste of.

If that does not sit right, go to ghee. Ghee is butter with the water and milk solids cooked off, so the lactose and casein go with them and what remains is essentially pure butterfat. It keeps at room temperature, it takes a much higher heat in a pan, and it is the answer for most of the people who genuinely react to dairy protein.

If the problem is cow dairy specifically, go to goat butter. Different casein profile, smaller fat globules, and a fair number of people who are finished with cow’s milk get on with it perfectly well. It is what I use. Sheep butter is worth a go if you can find it.

And raw butter, made from unpasteurised cream, if you have access to it, which is easier in the UK than most people assume.

Then use it properly, which means using far more of it than feels reasonable. Butter in the pan for the eggs and then more on the eggs. A knob melting on the steak as it rests. Butter in the coffee if you want a morning that lasts until two. Butter on anything roasted, stirred into anything hot, and sat out on the table in a dish where you can reach it rather than in the fridge where you cannot.

Four thousand years ago, somebody in Ireland thought butter was worth carrying out to a bog and putting in the ground for safekeeping. A tower in Rouen still carries its name. Six men in Cork graded it like bullion. The state rationed it to two ounces a week and then stockpiled a million tonnes of it and told you not to bother.

And it is still down the chiller at two quid a block, next to a shelf of tubs that were invented to be cheaper than it.

Dig it up.