Is Butter. Is Better.

What happened to good ‘old fashioned’ butter? You know, made from cream and a pinch of salt. There are a few tubs hidden away at the very end of the fridge aisle, but you have to go past a whole floral display of chemicals to find them. I’m talking about the scientific food minefield: margarine. Why are people veering their trolleys away from butter? Michael Pollan, a well acclaimed food journalist says, “Don’t eat anything your Great-Grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” Would your grandma have grabbed the margarine to make scones, to bake a cake or enrich gravy? I’m going to go with a no.

What is wrong with butter? People have been eating it for centuries, so why has it, in the last 40 years or so, been met with such a wall of negativity? It’s more natural than any of the other health-claim-wannabe’s on the shelf. And the taste? Margarine doesn’t stand close in the slightest when compared to a thick creamy layer of golden butter on a crusty piece of fresh bread, or the enriched taste it gives mushrooms when they’re sautéed in a pan. For me to explain the brilliance of butter, I will have to show you just how bad that margarine in your trolley is.

In a recent episode of Master chef, contestants were asked to make butter. The Twitter verse went crazy over how easy it was, saying things like “Wow, it’s that simple is it?” and “why doesn’t anyone make their own butter anymore?” So why do customers go for fake food items, when the real thing is sitting right next to it? Have we been bullied so much about fat that we’re now afraid of it? Dairy products seem to have taken the biggest blow, in terms of food products labeled as ‘Fat’ and ‘Bad’ for you. Now we can choose from light cheese, ‘No fat Yoghurt’, ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’, skim milk, ‘plastic’ cheese, ‘Butter soft’ and the various types of health-claim-cholesterol-dropping margarines. All these products use nutrients as buzzwords like added potassium, vitamin d, antioxidants, omega 3’s and proteins. Like full fat milk, butter is a taboo food item and is not welcome in the everyman’s trolley. But when we compare the diets around the world, the western diet is the worst in terms of health and sickness. We’re the ones with the obesity, the cancer, and the diabetes. So maybe our nutritionists don’t have all the answers.

How the times have changed, the legendary cook Julia Child once said “If you’re afraid of butter use cream” wise words, but to the consumers of today she sounds crazy. Just after her saying this, in the 1960’s, a new age of nutritionism took over and margarine was allowed to be injected with the colouring Tartazine E102 to make it yellow and appear like butter. Margarine then became the pop icon of modern food and hit the shelves in dozens of brands. A cheap try-hard version of creamy golden butter that told everyone it was healthier. How wrong it was. Regardless it took over. Consumers bought into its “99% Fat free” claims and “Added Omega 3” riffs. Who would have thought eating could get so sad and stoop to this level of crappy, spreadable, un-tasteful oil, BORING! I am an advocate of butter. Working in a French restaurant it seems to be the secret to making everything delicious. Bring butter back.

In recent times science has made the choices for consumers on what and whatnot to eat, but it just doesn’t seem to be cutting it. Our culture used to tell us how to eat: ‘Don’t eat those berries they’re poisonous’, ‘Don’t eat that meat, it’s gone rancid’. I say bring back the old wives tales. It’s not like our health could get any worse! These popular status-seeking foods, like margarine, need to be seen for what they really are. Bad. 

When I look at how ignored butter is in today’s world it saddens me. The idea of margarine being in my restaurant is almost unthinkable, I’ve never seen a chef use it, unless maybe to throw it at an apprentice, margarine is just not welcome otherwise.  Have you ever tried making a burn noissette with margarine? What you get is cruddy black sediment that reeks of something chemical, the nutty flavour you would get from butter is inexistent and instead it tastes almost like you’ve thrown a stick of glue into the pan instead. Why do we suddenly think we know better? Like margarine is the answer to all our cooking anxieties? Butter is as old as history, even Jesus was into it it’s that old, and it’s still made the same way it was centuries ago. A simple churning of cream and you’ve got yourself a smooth spreadable condiment that adds that needed moistness to a dry piece of bread, tastes sensational and that is not anything like margarine. Which alternatively, only gives the moist component to the bread and ultimately offers your toungue and tastebuds a tacky mouthfeel and dull taste. But butter is still left out on the shopping list, ignored in the supermarket aisles, and frowned upon at the checkout.

The process of making margarine is far more complicated than butter’s simple over whipping of cream. It involves hydrogenating clear unappetising fats or plant oils so that they become solid and paste like, then a whole bunch of chemicals and colourings are added to make it somewhat like butter. I spoke with  an electrician who has worked at an Edible Oil Industries (EOI) factory plant in Marrackville. He says, “There was allot of oils stored in a huge tank that had a number of vats that all combined to create different brands of margarine. If the temperature was lost on the lines feeding the mixing vats it would be a gooey mess of solidifying fat with a very greasy smell” Margarine is an imitation, and to me a total waste of time and money. It is butter’s pure taste and high fat content that makes it the best for cooking and baking, as it yields the best results in terms of tenderness and flakiness. Imagine a cake made with margarine; it would probably taste like soap and not have much bounce. Everything in moderation is the key, eating chemicals is not. In Michael Pollan’s recent book ‘Food Rules’, a smaller condensed ‘How to eat’ that follows on from his very informative ‘In Defense of Food’, we are given a gutsy eaters manual that takes this ‘back to basics’ approach to eating.  As Michael Pollan reiterates, “If it came from a plant eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t”

A dairy farmer who sells his homemade butter at the north Sydney markets (run on the first Saturday of each month) spoke to me to talk about the secret of his sough- after organic butter. He said, “I just keep whipping.” These small tubs of yellow golden butter are local, fresh and free from nasty chemicals.. Food isn’t meant to be so complicated; in fact the simpler it is, the better it is for you.  It’s this kind of food we should aspire to consume. We’re not only supporting farmers and producers, we’re also making the healthier choice.

Interestingly butter wasn’t consumed properly until the sixteenth century. The English delayed this by using it for fuel in lamps (do they ever get food right?) Enter the French, who crafted the foundations of butter and consumed it in truckloads. They made sauces like Hollandaise and Béarnaise, made pastries like the Croissant and Danish, and enriched sweets like caramel and short-crust pastry. Their cuisine of today has a lot to thank for butter, the ‘Larousse Gastronomique’ would not be the same without it. Butter to the French is the essence of life, where we say ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” The French say ‘You can’t have the butter and the money from selling the butter.’ Without butter the French would only have snails and frogs to sell.

But the French liked butter so much that in the 1860’s emperor Napoleon III awarded a prize to anyone who could come up with a cheaper substitute. Who would have thought it would be the experts of butter, to create its ultimate nemesis. Invented by a chemist, margarine entered the food scene along with its good friend industrialization and the two have been happily married ever since.  By the 1950’s butter had lost its appeal as consumers were told to go for the cheaper and ‘healthier’ option in margarine. Marketers and advertisers made it very hard for butter to get a reach out at the supermarket so many companies swapped over to margarine manufacturing. Giving the people what they wanted. This is where the ‘Butter vs Margarine’ debate gets laid on a little thick (pun intended.)

Margarine is not real food and you can tell with one glance at the ingredients. Michael Pollan suggests, “Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.” Margarine is then, by this, a total fraud. What do we classify as ‘Food’? Is it anything edible, even down to those chemicals and preservatives food science is coming up with and shoving into these foods believed to be modern? Or is it something made from natural ingredients grown and cultivated on the earth?

To go shopping in a supermarket today is a scientific literary experience. Margarine alone seems to need more surface area for the amount of random words it has to fit on its label. Then the ingredients list is offered at the smallest possible font type, forcing one to put their glasses on to read it, and when you do, there doesn’t seem to have been much point.  The ingredients are a whole lot of gobble-de-gook, nothing you’d find in your average pantry

 How many of the following ingredients can you recognize?

Vegetable oils (corn, soybean), Hydrogen, whey, water, salt, emulsifiers; mono- and diglyceride, soy lecithin, vitamins A, Vitamin D3, flavoring, Vitamin A palmitate, Beta Carotene, potassium sorbate, sodium benzonate. Contains milk and soy.

I found this quote from a ‘Spread the facts campaign on margarine’ it reads: “About 99% of the ingredients in Meadow Lea, a leading brand of margarine spreads, are naturally sourced and can be found in the pantry of most Australian homes.”

Funny I don’t have potassium sorbate in my pantry. Do you?

If you try to read the ingredients of margarine out aloud (if you can pronounce the words) it sounds like your embarking on some sort of science experiment! Although it’s probably not the worst ingredient list I’ve ever seen, there are some absolute shockers out on the shelves, it still tick’s allot of  ‘No No’ boxes. A run through the list you will see artificial flavorings, supplements, preservatives, emulsifying agents (used to make things that don’t like to be together be together, like water and oil) and a whole lot of colour to make it look like the real thing.  Basically these chemicals are used to make something cheap and easily sourced, like vegetable oils, last long, look ‘edible’ and taste something like butter. Which in comparison has the ingredients list of three: cream, water and salt.

The body easily absorbs the naturally occurring vitamins in organic, grass-grazing cow-butter, as they are un-tampered with and made by nature, not by a food scientist’s lab equipment. But the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils or fats used to make margarine actually can block the bodies ability to utilize essential fatty acids which, while we’re told to avoid these, are in fact essential to being healthy and having a well-functioning body. Margarine is not so easily used by the body and can cause problems like: sexual dysfunction, increased blood cholesterol and paralysis of the immune system. This spread, this substitute for the real thing, this fake phony wannabe imitation is diminishing our health! As George Vigil a co-founder of the ‘We want organic food’ website says; “ Eating hydrogenated fats has been linked to cancer, atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), diabetes, worsening eyesight, obesity, birth defects, and sterility, problems with bones and tendons and heart disease. The vegetable oils can go rancid. Margarine contains preservatives, which are good for shelf life but lousy for you’re digestive tract. You're eating something the body is trying to digest, but that ‘something’ contains preservatives which fight digestion.”

‘I can’t believe it’s not butter?’ I can. The marketing attempts advertisers have used to make us fall into the trap of becoming margarine consumers are ridiculous. Who could forget Russell Clarke’s 1982 add for butter, with a mechanical cow to show the fake, artificial nature of margarine compared to the real taste of ‘direct from a cow’ butter. Where are the advertising campaigns like this for today’s consumers?

 Rule number fourteen of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules says, “Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature” Today the products located in the middle of your supermarket shelves are far from nature, actually they’re probably hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from where they were first grown. To make margarine, food manufacturers have taken a single, cheap, easy-to-grow material from who knows where and over-processed it to the point of being classified as edible. Progress? It’s making us fat, lazy and ignorant. Food should not be this! It is time we took things back to basics. Back to butter! Again Michael Pollan suggests, “If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat”

Nutritionists seem to be embarking on a new way of seeing food as a collection of nutrients, and not FOOD. If you need calcium it can be added to your low fat cheese, if you need iron it can be added to your skim milk. What happened to going to the source?  Nutritionism has reigned for too long, and our lifestyles have become too obsessed with its rules and diets. Michael Pollan explains, “The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting it’s hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.”

Science has been the determining factor in allot of our food choices in the modern era. Nutritionists have replaced food with something else: nutrients. And because we can’t feel or taste nutrients we need someone to tell us how to eat. Butter and margarine are products in a world of many. But margarine was the first step towards a mountain of imitation products that have continued to mess with our pantries, swindle our taste buds and change our lifestyles. It’s time we choose culture over science. If we bring back butter, we bring back the idea that food can still be simple and real. In a world full of an obscene amount of choice and variety, I feel the answer is simple. The choice is made for you.