Better butter. January 10, 2014Posted by ourfriendben in homesteading, wit and wisdom.
Tags: better butter, butter, healthy butter, Laurel's Kitchen, margarine, trans fats, US butter consumption
Silence Dogood here. I grew up eating butter. My beloved Mama thought margarine was horrid and unhealthful, so only real butter ever made an appearance in our house. Of course, I loved it. As Chef Didier says in the movie “Last Holiday,” “You and I know the secret to life… it’s butter.” I couldn’t agree more.
But butter began getting a very bad rep in the age of fat-free diets, when it was associated with high cholesterol and heart attacks. Even before that, health-oriented, vegetarian-friendly cookbooks like Laurel’s Kitchen provided recipes for “Better Butter,” mixing softened butter with polyunsaturated vegetable oils like safflower oil and refrigerating it so it would resolidify and could be spread on toast and the like like real butter. (I made “Better Butter” and it was fine, if a bit “slipperier” than butter.)
Now, however, the outrage over the health concerns of trans-fats, widely used in margarine and other commercial butter substitutes, and new research on the health effects of butter have brought it back into the spotlight. Americans in 2012 consumed 5.6 pounds of butter per person, and everyone from chefs to nutritionists are touting its benefits—in moderation, of course.
“Moderation” being a relative term. If 5.6 pounds of butter a year sounds like a lot to you, consider this statistic: Prior to 1935, the average American consumption of butter was 18 pounds a year. Which means that half of us ate more than 18 pounds of butter every year! Butter consumption dropped due to a combination of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, when margarine was introduced as a cheap alternative to a populace whose butter supply had been cut off.
Let’s compare this to the average consumption of sugar in the U.S., including all forms of sugar, such as the notorious high-fructose corn syrup. Two hundred years ago, the average American consumed just 2 pounds of sugar a year. By 1970, that number had risen to 123 pounds; today, it’s nearly 152 pounds per person. That puts butter’s 5.6 pounds in perspective, doesn’t it?
I think we’d be best off cutting our sugar consumption rather than obsessing over our use of butter. If you’re worried about butter’s health effects, buy organic butter, or butter from cows that aren’t fed GMO grains and corn and aren’t injected with bovine growth hormones and antioxidants. Then relax and enjoy in moderation!
‘Til next time,