Butter

I am sitting at the end of a long farm table, looking at a scattering of condiments towards the other end. Among the salt shakers and bottles of hot sauce is a three inch yellow cube on a plate under plastic wrap.

I should tell you that this farm is on an island and has (among many other animals) one extremely free-range dairy cow. I forget her name, but she has one. I encountered her a number of times as we both wandered around the farm pursuing our respective agendas. Both involved renewable energy - photovoltaics and wind on my part, indigenous biomass on her part.

When I sat down to my first meal here the cook pointed out both the regular butter and the farm butter. At first I didn’t get it. The yellow cube she pointed to looked like a chunk of cheddar cheese. It didn’t register as butter to my eyes. Later I figured it out and tried some.

It was as different from store-bought butter as cream cheese is from aged cheddar. The farm butter was a brilliantly rich yellow, the real yellow that food processors try to put into supposedly buttery food with artificial color. It was almost tacky looking it was so…real. It had a creaminess and an uber-buttery flavor alien to the white stick of the grocery store. The texture was firmer than commercial butter at room temperature, but not as hard when chilled. I was thrilled and consumed a goodly portion of heavily buttered homemade bread.

Of course I asked to buy a pound to take home. The only problem is that it will run out and the farm is too far to visit just to get butter.

I mention this experience to point out part of what we have lost with industrialized agriculture. We have gained convenience, for sure. We have cheap food, or at least cheap calories. We have consistency. What we have less of is flavor, color, and texture. Read Michael Pollan and others on the subject and you’ll find that we have also lost nutritional value.

But forget about that for the moment. Let’s consider consistency, as in invariability, sameness. It is a culinary virtue only in terms of food safety. The aforementioned cook told me that the character of the butter changed with the seasons, according to the cow’s diet. The spring butter is the richest, when the cow is grazing on the new growth. It gets whiter and leaner in the winter when the cow can’t graze at all. How wonderful. I want my food to carry the sign of when it was created. It’s not just about some romantic vision of agriculture. It’s about knowing, truly understanding, what I’m putting into my body. I like being able to meet the person who produced my food. Or the cow, for that matter. That is real food safety.

Michael Pollan writes about the abstraction of food. Beef is beef is beef, wherever it came from. Eggs are eggs and butter is butter. In the past few years people have been challenging this abstraction by pointing out the real differences in taste and nutrition between industrially produced food and traditionally produced food. The difference is there, it is real, and it is dramatic. The contrast just smacked me between the eyes again.

Buttered toast for breakfast tomorrow.


Comments

[Rus]

MH,

You've certainly done it again. What you write about butter changing with the seasons is so obvious that, having never experienced it, it never occurred to me. Duh...

As always, thanks for the provocative postings.

Cheers,

Rus