For 21 years, Quebec made sure margarine didn't resemble butter too much. Lighter or darker, as long as the chemical alternative didn't dupe consumers after the real stuff. This policy also allowed the province to retain such an influential dairy industry. But earlier this week, the Cabinet decided margarine could now be any color—even a gold buttery one.
How bad is Japan's butter shortage? Here's some more photographic evidence: Yongfook, a web designer based in Tokyo, took this photo in a supermarket where a block of a butter blend now costs about $7. So for $14 you could get a full only-butter block.
Previously
Japan Is Running Out of Butter
Unbelieveable! This Is Not Butter!
A sign explains "that the management does not know when the next shipment of butter will come."
Japanese croissant-lovers be afraid: Japan is going through an extreme butter shortage:
Where is the butter? — cry Japanese consumers who have been hunting everywhere for the dairy product. The drastic reduction in raw milk production, complicated by hikes in the price of grain as well as changes in the global patterns of dairy product consumption, have caused a serious butter shortage in Japan. Empty shelves in the dairy section of grocery stores across the country have not seen a shipment of butter for days, and stores are posting signs apologizing for the shortage.
[via Boing Boing]
It's good to be proud of your product. So much that you want your food mascot to be consuming the goods too, hence a packaging with the Droste effect. This Dutch term refers to a repetitive cycle of art in a diminishing, hypothetically neverending series. Logically it cannot go on forever though. For example, the Land O' Lakes label depicts their Native-American maiden mascot showing off her favorite buttah brand. But does the mini maiden hold an even minier maiden? We can only hope. Tricky, tricky stuff. [via Box Vox]
In the past year or so, my local grocery store upped its number of high-end butter offerings. In addition to the Lurpak and Plugra brands I'd known, there were entrants from Italy, Ireland, and France. Is there a huge difference among them all? The blogger Miss Ginsu attempts to find out by tasting nine different high-end butters, domestic and imported.
"Brown butter is one of the great ingredients quietly hiding in your refrigerator." Michael Ruhlman reminds us that brown butter, or butter that has been cooked until the solids turn brown, can be used in just about anything that uses butter to impart nutty and caramel flavors.
A child answers the question: Who loves butter?
From Lazy Man and Health.
Related, 'Paula Deen is Trying Kill Us': Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Everyone has heard of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, the margarine spread with the memorably comical name. While there are many butter substitutes gracing our grocery store shelves (oh yes, how they make my stomach juices flow), I assumed that this was the only product that used the word "butter" to market its superiority over other butter substitutes through its fascinating ability to be mistaken for real butter.
But my world of fake butter (population: 1) was turned upside-down when I read Elyse Sewell's livejournal entry documenting curious products from her local supermarket, including two more I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!-like products: Butter It's Not! and Could It Be Butter? I found these names just as amusing as I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, possibly more so, but googling their names showed that the Internet didn't really give a damn about these other products. While I Can't Believe It's Not Butter returned 95,100 results, Butter It's Not returned 1,760 results and Could It Be Butter? brought up the rear with a paltry 186 results.
I came across a few other fake butter products with peculiar names. Check out the full gallery after the jump.
I know Paula Deen seems like a nice little old lady, with her big silver hair and friendly Southern drawl, but today I've finally come to believe that she's pure evil. How else to explain why she would unleash a recipe for deep fried butter balls on an unsuspecting public?
No, I am not making that up, and yes, the recipe really is what it sounds like: Deep-fried. Balls. Of. Butter. You mix butter with cream cheese, shape it into balls, freeze them, and then drop them in the deep-fryer. People, she must be stopped.
Paula Deen Is Trying to Kill Us, Part 2: Bacon-Wrapped Fried Mac
Paula Deen Is Trying to Kill Us, Part 3: Velveeta Fudge
Paula Deen Is Trying to Kill Us, Part 4: Bacon, Doughnut, Egg Burger
Paula Deen Is Trying to Kill Us, Part 5: Butter, Mayo, Whiz Cheese Spread
Slate's Daniel Engber wonders why we praise El Bulli's Ferran Adrià for using xanthan gum but recoil at the use of FD&C Red No. 40 in red velvet cake, and says our aversion to artificial coloring makes no sense:
If the artificial colors are as safe as natural ingredients and they don't taste bad, then why should we avoid them? The gastronome might argue that the chemical dyes impart a color that's unappetizing on its own terms. The garish brilliance of red velvet cake has no referent in nature; it's disgusting because it's fake. Natural dyes, on the other hand, can make food look wholesome and real, by restoring our ingredients to their natural state. If a stalk of rhubarb loses its rosy hue in the saucepan, we add it back by boiling the skins. But to take this distinction seriously, you have to accept the outdated idea that a food has a "natural color" to begin with.
For instance, the fruits we call "oranges" are often green when they're fully ripe. (They turn orange on the tree only when they're exposed to cold weather or bathed in ethylene gas.) The oranges you buy at the supermarket may look natural, but there's a good chance they've been coated with Citrus Red No. 2. Likewise, we're all familiar with the faint, yellowish color of pure butter. (Margarine manufacturers were once penalized for conniving to make their pale-white substitute look more like the real thing.) But thanks to a loophole in the FDA's labeling rules, that wholesome shade is often the result of added dyes.
Fran McCollough, who wrote the book on the subject (The Good Fat Cookbook), has a persuasive letter in today's Times urging a return to sanity on the whole butter-transfat uproar. Her coup de grace: "These ignorant food police mandates will soon lead us to ban mother's milk, loaded as it is with "bad" things: cholesterol, saturated fat, sugar and trans fat."
Previously: Trans Fat Fight Claims Butter as a Victim
Harold McGee knows everything, including the reason why milk, butter, olive oil and beer taste funny if exposed to light for too long.
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