Some hard questions about butter

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 AgriFood 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 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 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.

“Palmitic acid, which is different from palm fat, is a naturally occurring part of the fat of many plants and animals in various levels,” the advocacy group said. “It is estimated that the increase in the palmitic fatty acid profile of dairy fat linked to this feeding practice is less than three per cent.”

Lactalis Canada, maker of Lactantia, President and Beatrice brand butters, is aware of the consistency concerns.

“We can confirm that there have been no changes to our butter-making process or ingredients,” a spokesperson told National Post.

From shampoo to toothpaste, doughnuts and chocolate, palm oil is used in nearly 50 per cent of the packaged goods available in supermarkets, the WWF says. Some of the world’s most biodiverse forests have been cleared to make room for palm oil plantations, displacing orangutans and other endangered species.

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. In 2020, butter sales grew by 21 per cent, according to Nielsen. A surge of baking and butter-buying has changed some people’s knowledge of the staple in yet another way the pandemic has affected our relationship with food.