An expensive toast to bounty that is butter
Have you seen the price of butter? We live in a land where dairy cows have multiplied like flies in summer, so as compensation for the ruined rivers you’d think we might at least get bargain butter. But no. The price of the stuff has doubled of late. It’s become a luxury.
One has to feel sorry for pensioners. Brought up to see butter as a staple, they can now barely afford it.
It seems unfair. And it seems especially unfair when you know why the price has risen. But let’s begin at the beginning.
Butter is simple. At Hassocks County Primary School half a century ago Miss Turner handed out bottles of cream and told us to shake them till our arms ached.
When we opened our bottles we found a blob of something pale and yellow.
Miss Turner, who was as old as it was possible to be and had a throat like a turkey, made us fish out our blobs and put them together. Whereupon she added salt, patted the whole into shape with a pair of wooden bats, and then made us sandwiches.
It was the last time I enjoyed a science lesson and the only time I ate one.
But butter is even older than Miss Turner was.
It’s been discovered by every human society that’s had the wit to steal milk from other mammals.
Great cuisines are founded on butter. You can’t make a croissant with low-fat spread.
Every Indian dish starts with ghee. Deprive Tibetans of yak butter and they see no point in going on.
Butter is such an obvious good. To taste it is to know so.
It enriches any sauce, any anything. I once compiled a list of foodstuffs that butter did not improve. Ice-cream was one, and I wondered whether cucumber was perhaps another. End of list.
Yet those of us who love butter have been out of step with the zeitgeist.
By zeitgeist I mean the usual culprits in the dietary field, the harpies of health and wellbeing, the five-a-day fanatics, the officials of single-issue pseudo-medical lobby groups with names like the Society for the Healthy Heart, or Guardians of the Arteries.
Who funds these people I don’t know, but I do know that for decades they were as one in vilifying butter.
Butter kills, they said. It lodges in our workings and it stills our fluttering hearts. It blocks the blood, the brain, the organism. Shun butter or die, they said, and they went on to preach more virtuous diets.
They praised the Italian diet of olive oil, pasta and organised crime, the Japanese diet of seaweed, rice and slavish devotion to authority, the diet of anywhere but where we were.
And people paid attention. They always do. It’s vanity and fear of death.
At the sight of a pat of butter the longevity freaks and lycra narcissists leapt aboard their exercycles and pedalled away from it as fast as they could go.
But recently the exercycles have turned back round. For it’s been revealed, astonishingly, that animal fats are good things after all.
It’s carbohydrates that are our deadly enemy now.
Did you not hear the apologies from the pseudo-scientists, the mea culpas from the grinning nutritionists, the admission that they’d got it wrong about butter?
No neither did I, just as I have never heard them admit that they were wrong about cholesterol, or about eggs, or about almost every foodstuff at one time or another.
Yet they were indeed wrong. And the simple truth remains true: that the body is a complex organism and that we are omnivores and that a bit of what we fancy does us good.
But rather than stringing up the dieticians from the nearest gingko tree (extract of which may help to support the immune system) the longevity freaks have accepted the new pro-butter edict as if the anti-butter edict had never been.
They’re now shovelling the stuff down in unprecedented quantities.
I am told that in the more expensive parts of Manhattan it is fashionable to smear one’s pilates instructor with butter and at the end of the class to lick him or her clean.
The upshot is that demand for butter in the wealthy west has soared, the price has risen, and the poor old pensioner who’s eaten butter all her life now can’t afford it.
Is this a case for Winston, the old ones’ friend?
I’ve been rude about Winston, I’ll admit, but I’m approaching the pension myself now. And if he were to put discount butter on the gold card, to let us taste old age, I’d take it all back.