National Post (National Edition)
Is this the new (hard) butter?
Chemist Amy Proulx was browsing the butter aisle at her local grocery store, trying to pinpoint four-digit establishment codes on Ontario packaging that would help her understand the correlation between butter firmness and manufacturing systems.
“Someone came up to me and said, `Oh, butter. Have you heard about buttergate?' and I'm like, `Uh, yeah,'” recalls Proulx, a Niagara College professor and president of the Canadian Institute of Food Science and Technology. “And they said, `I don't trust the butter' and they grabbed the margarine. And I said, `Well, you do realize margarine is made with palm oil.' And they said, `At least there I know what's in (it).'”
This sums up how buttergate has progressed since Feb. 15, when Le Journal de Montréal broke the story about a possible connection between the use of palm oil supplements in cow feed and complaints about hard butter.
There have also been reports of strangely textured cheese and non-foaming milk.
Buttergate captured the attention of University of Guelph professor and Canada Research Chair Alejandro Marangoni. “Everybody talked, talked, talked, but there was no data,” he says. In the University of Guelph's food lab, he began measuring hardness and fatty acid composition in butter samples.
He recently completed an analysis of 51 butters collected from Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia, and found a correlation between palmitic acid content and butter firmness: harder butters have higher levels of palmitic acid.
Marangoni's findings will be published later this year, in a report written by Dalhousie University's AgriFood Analytics Lab (AAL), which provided the National Post with an exclusive preview of the results.
Marangoni found a correlation coefficient of 0.8, which indicates a fairly strong relationship between butter firmness and palmitic acid content. While butter hardness can be affected by a series of factors, he explains, the data suggests that 64 per cent of that effect can be explained by the palmitic acid content.
Butter containing high levels of palmitic acid is firmer and has different melting characteristics, Marangoni adds, which has been catalogued in the scientific literature.
“There's no mystery to this. It's all published and (researchers at the University of California, Davis) actually showed that if you feed (cows) more palmitic, the milk fat in the milk ends up having more palmitic, and then you make butter and the butter's harder. No mystery, but here it was shrouded in mystery.”
Marangoni was able to compare today's palmitic acid levels to the Canadian Nutrient File, which Health Canada last updated in 2015. Six years ago, the government department considered an average butter composition to be 26 per cent palmitic acid.
Some of the samples Marangoni tested reached as high as 40 per cent, with most coming in at roughly 35 per cent palmitic acid. One notable outlier was Thornloe's certified grass-fed butter from Temiskaming in northern Ontario, which was just 28 per cent palmitic acid.
“There's almost none left that have low palmitic acid and it's actually very surprising,” says Marangoni. “So, is this the new butter?”
Proulx, who was not involved in Marangoni's data collection or analysis but has reviewed his findings, highlights that the correlation between increasing palmitic acid concentration and butter hardness is unsurprising. She's interested in how manufacturing speed and low-cost processes also contribute to firmness.
Demand for butter grew by 21 per cent in 2020, according to Nielsen. Canada's supply management system sets milk prices and quotas; acquiring more raw materials to meet an unanticipated surge isn't a simple proposition.
Canadian butter-making methods have remained the same for decades, Proulx says, and are well-documented. So while the technique may not have changed in the face of increased demand, it's conceivable that the conditions have.
Proulx conducted a secondary analysis of Marangoni's data in which she separated the butter samples by method of production: premium versus discount or no-name brands.
“We see clear changes in firmness … with more premium products as softer products, irrespective of whether they are grass-fed or organic, or just a premium brand,” says Proulx. “Discount brand butters are the hardest, suggesting that a method of production which allows for cheaper and higher efficiency manufacturing is creating a difference.”
Likewise, Marangoni says that processing “can have a huge effect” on butter texture and suspects that the increasing hardness at the heart of buttergate is due to the interaction of two key factors: a change in chemical composition (i.e., higher levels of palmitic acid) and processing conditions.
A spokesperson for the Dairy Processors Association of Canada (DPAC) told the National Post that over the past few weeks, it has been part of the working group established by the Dairy Farmers of Canada to investigate the issue. At time of writing, DPAC has yet to respond to a request for comment on whether processing conditions have changed.
Two months after buttergate broke, hardness has apparently taken a back seat to distrust. The difference in texture, says Proulx, is minor when compared to the larger issue of transparency.
“If I were to suggest a next bit of research, I would be more interested in the consumer side, and behaviours and attitudes towards food processing,” she says. “What sort of transparency and what sort of information do consumers want to know about the quality of their food? How can we, as the food industry, do better to be part of that relationship, and be respectful of the needs of our consumers while also understanding that most of our food goes through industrial processing. Even including many of our products that appear to be very minimally processed.”
“The whole idea here ... is to help the dairy industry,” says professor Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the AAL. “I think everyone wants a stronger dairy industry. But to get stronger, the first step would be to acknowledge there is a problem.”
The fact that consumers were unaware of a decades-long practice of using fat supplements “truly became the lightning rod in the whole discussion,” he adds.
Buttergate cracked an uncomfortable question wide open, says Marangoni: Do people really know how food is made? Images of a local, natural product — cows grazing in fields and wooden churns — were replaced by those of oil palms half a world away.
“I'm a food scientist; I understand very well what happens,” says Marangoni. “I buy butter because I don't want to buy margarine, maybe you do the same. You want a natural product. You don't want something that's tampered with.”