Ottawa Citizen

SOME HARD FACTS ABOUT BUTTER.

- LAURA BREHAUT

Soft and creamy under the knife, good butter should spread. But in a collective occurrence, people have been reporting a lack of smooth spreadabil­ity on social media in past months. Even when left at room temperatur­e, they say their butter fails to soften as it once did.

In December, Sylvain Charlebois tweeted: “Is it me or is #butter much harder now at room temperatur­e?” The senior director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab followed up his observatio­n with a Twitter poll on Feb. 9 in which 52.9 per cent of respondent­s said their butter was “no longer soft at room temperatur­e since about August 2020.”

Calgary-based cookbook author Julie Van Rosendaal also recently put the question to her social media followers.

More than 1,000 comments later, it seems as though many have experience­d butter too watery to grease a pan, too rubbery or firm to spread on a slice of bread.

The answer, Le Journal de Montréal reports, may lie in a common animal feed supplement: palm oil.

An “open secret” in the industry as a way to increase butterfat in cow’s milk, “many’’ Quebec dairy producers told the Journal they use palm oil, speaking under the condition of anonymity.

Several cheese makers also expressed apprehensi­ons about the practice, which has been in place for decades, according to a Producteur­s de lait du Québec spokespers­on.

There are several reasons why producers might add it to feed, according to RealAgricu­lture: “To help balance a ration (the amount of feed an animal receives), to help make up for shortfalls in the nutritiona­l quality of hay or forage, or to achieve the desired butterfat needed to meet a farm’s monthly quota in Canada’s supply managed system.”

The Dairy Farmers of Canada told the National Post, “Palm products, including those derived from palm oil, are sometimes added to dairy cows’ rations in limited amounts to increase the energy density of cow diets if needed.”

Varying with the breed and diet of the cow, butter is roughly 50 per cent saturated fat, 30 per cent monounsatu­rated and four per cent polyunsatu­rated.

The rest is made up of water and milk solids, according to the cookbook called Fat by Jennifer McLagan.

Saturated fatty acids have higher melting points than unsaturate­d, and palm oil is 50-per-cent saturated fat.

The amount of palm oil used in cow feed is small, the Dairy Farmers of Canada said, and has a limited effect on the fatty acid profile of the milk.

Whether palm oil is related to a scourge of hard butter across Canada or not remains to be seen.

But its role in the production of such a local, presumably elemental food — cows make milk, milk makes butter — is an eye-opener.

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