Ten years of Side Stepping Normal – Bizarrely excited
On 10 March 2014, we posted the ninth of our original Side Stepping Normal blog posts. In this series of eleven essays, we look back to our original attempt to write about our move towards a more self-sufficient lifestyle. In this short essay we described the fact that we now owned a butter dish. That doesn’t sound like much, but there was a bigger point about it as well.
Bizarrely excited – we now own a Butter Dish! | 10 March 2014
Butter dishes are one of those kitchen items that you don’t tend to need when you are at university. It’s an oddity that your parents might own and perhaps might seldom use. What’s the point in it? Butter can last perfectly well in the fridge in its original wrapping. Then there is the whole argument: should I be buying margarine or butter? We grew up in the 80s and 90s during a time when butter was considered extremely unhealthy and should only be used for some cooking and for occasional treats. It was by no means to be part of the staple diet. God forbid!
More recently butter has made a comeback and we have entirely rediscovered it. First of all, butter simply tastes better than other spreads. Second, butter has been proven now to be no worse (at least) than margarine, indeed some studies seem to think that margarine are more harmful. It’s very hard to know for sure. One day the media tells us that scientists have proven that butter is better than margarine, the next you will probably get cancer from it! These days we make our judgement based on one simple test: which is the more processed of the two?
Margarine does, however, have one thing over butter. Butter in the fridge is simply too hard to easily spread on most breads, even homemade ones.
About a year ago we came to the conclusion that it is better to leave the butter outside of the fridge when using it, and buying a butter dish makes that easier (I can choose how much butter to put outside of the fridge at any given time). I am therefore very proud (and bizarrely excited) by my new purchase. That rather odd item in my parent’s kitchen that looked like an old relic long ago replaced by the progress of margarine in nice plastic tubs, is back in style again!
Long live butter; long last the china butter dish!
Ten years later
Buying a butter dish wasn’t really about the dish itself but more about a realisation about butter. We had both believed that butter would go off if it was left out of the fridge for any length of time. The same with eggs as well. Neither is true. For a while, we had been microwaving butter so that it would be more spreadable. We then got rid of the microwave (thankfully!). Why we believed that butter had to be put in the fridge, I now don’t know. We had both lived in households as kids with margarine more often available, than butter. Margarine goes in the fridge; thus, the presumption must have been that butter had to as well. That, and the fact that butter is sold in the fridges in supermarkets.
Of course, butter will go off quicker out of the fridge than in it, but it lasts long enough to be used. These days we have a constant supply of it kept in the fridge, generally brought in 250g packets. However, we always bring one out to keep in the butter dish. In the height of summer, this is usually reduced to half a slab of butter as it goes off quicker. This seems to work well.
Arguments against and for butter
I realise that there is an argument against using butter that has nothing to do with how unhealthy it might be compared to margarine (a claim I’m a bit dubious about). To produce 250g of butter uses more energy than the alternatives and requires cows to be farmed, sometimes in less than adequate spaces. Meanwhile, margarine uses certain oils which are generally less ecologically destructive. Such claims are not entirely true or simple. A counterargument can be made about the environmental cost of monocropping the oils used to produce margarine.
These issues and challenges are important, but I will never voluntarily go back to margarine. Firstly, most margarines are highly processed. As a rule, I try to reduce processed foods in my diet, rather than add them. Butter can be made at home if you have the time (and access to cheap cream). Margarine can, admittedly, also be made at home with only a few ingredients, but much of the stuff brought in shops has a much longer list of elements in them.
That’s not the main reason, however. If I’m honest with myself, I have always hated the taste of margarine. In the 80s and 90s when our household mostly transferred to margarine, I increasingly spread it as thin as I possibly could. When at Uni, I even tried to make sandwiches without margarine or butter by simply spreading jam directly onto the bread or just adding cheese. I’ll admit, that didn’t work massively well, but it shows the extremes I was willing to go to, to avoid the taste of margarine. In the end I reverted back to butter, and I’ve never looked back.
What are your preferences? Do you prefer butter or margarine, and why? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.