June 29, 2019 • 49 mins
There's more to butter than meets the eye. Each yellow pat of fatty goodness is nothing short of processed solar energy, and its long history entails many a magical and sacred rite. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian consider the curious nature of butter. (Originally published Jan 10, 2017)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault. This time we're pulling
an episode from January. This is an episode that you
did with Christian. Yeah, this was a pretty fun one
that I figured would be a good one to pull
back out because it's the science of holy butter. It's
(00:26):
it's some of the parts I remember the most. Or
we're just talking about what butter is and how it's
kind of amazing, the the saga that it goes through
because it's essentially sunlight. It is sunlight transformed through a
few different processes into a lump of substance that you
have in your refrigerator. Well, I guess that's true of
(00:47):
pretty much all our food. But yes, but but it
looks like sight. It looks like sunlight, you know, it
has it seems to shine and uh and also we
get into some of the sacred ideas wrap up in
butter and uh and and all of this. A lot
of this is spring boarding off of an excellent butter
book that will reference in the episode. All right, well,
(01:09):
butter up. Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from
how Stuff Works dot Com. I'll this is the secret
name of butter, tongue of the gods navel of immortality.
(01:32):
We will proclaim the name of butter. We will sustain
it in this sacrifice by bowing low. These waves of
butter flow like gazelles before the hunter. Streams of butter
caress the burning wood agne. The fire loves them and
is satisfied. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
(01:59):
My name is Robert la and my name is Christian Seger.
Bow at the feet of butter. Yeah, I thought we
needed a nice regal opening there. And that is a
quote from the rig Veda. Uh. This is from around
fifteen hundred b CE. So we're going to really dive
into butter. The episode I wanted to do like an
(02:19):
episode title called Holy Butter Batman that it seems like
that might fit the best. But we we are going
to talk about religious uses of butter. We're also going
to talk about the basics food science of preparing butter,
and then butter war, which is a very real thing,
in fact, so real that it's generated a satirical uh
(02:44):
children's book all about butter. Yes, I imagine a number
of you were familiar with this. It is a Dr
Seuss The butter Battle Book published in and it's a
It is a satire that tackled the very serious topic
of cold wool or the nuclear arms race and mutually
assured destruction. It is the only children's book that I've
(03:06):
run across that ends with the contemplation of mutually assured
nuclear destruction. Yeah, I uh, you know, I was not
familiar with this specific Dr SEUs book until today. And
I watched the Ralph Backshet animated version on YouTube this
morning in coporation for this, and it blew my mind.
It was like, I I wonder how it would have
(03:28):
changed me as a person if I had seen this
when I was like four or five years old. You know, Yeah,
I don't think I saw it when I was a kid.
And this is the this animated version, by the way,
narrated by Charles Dearning. Of anyone else who's not familiar
with it, you can you should be able to find
it on YouTube. Yeah, it was everywhere, and it's yeah,
it's such an interesting story because to to a kid,
it's just a goofy tale involving these bird like people
(03:51):
and the basic plot here is you have a cold
war between two factions. One side firmly believes that you
put your butter on top of the toast, on top
of the bread, and then the other side, on the
other side of this big wall, they believe you put
the butter on the bottom of the bread. And that
sounds ridiculous and would never happen with real human beings.
(04:11):
And yet when we talk about margarine and butter and
what happened with them in the nineteenth century going into
the twentieth century, not that long ago. Uh, it's not
that far apart. Yeah. I think one of the things
about butter is that today especially we just take it
completely for granted. It's maybe a little less if you
you buy really good butter, or you you get involved
(04:34):
in a in a you know, a love affair with
with with coffee with butter in it, with bulletproof coffee
like that. But for the most part, you know, it's
just this is yellow stuff that's maybe delicious and and
certainly has a huge role in so many different recipes,
and large quantities of it go into most you know,
restaurant foods to make it delightful. But we don't think
(04:55):
about the wonder of butter. We don't think about the
alchemy of butter and the miracle butter, and it's easy
to forget that we have all of these wonderful examples
from human history, where where as our their introduction suggests
there is there is something divine about butter. Well, it's
certainly tastes great. And I don't think I've ever met
(05:16):
a person who says they don't like butter, you know,
like everyone likes butter. It's it's butter. It's great, it
tastes great. But um, when you may not use better
for you know, even they made an ethical or dietary choice, right, yeah, totally,
but but still it tastes, tastes lovely. Uh. It's funny
you mentioned like the taste of it and like it
(05:38):
being so ubiquitous because you're right, Like I use butter
every day in cooking somewhere or another. Uh, and I
just kind of always get the generic store brand, you know.
And then my wife recently splurged and she bought that
carry gold Irish butter that like, it's really really good,
kind of expensive butter, and it I like reserve of
(06:00):
it for special things, like I don't don't just cook
with carry gold butter, you know, like like that's that's special. Yeah,
we got into that better. Alam back, my wife and
I when we we briefly did we did like a
summer of the coffee butter concoction. Yeah. I remember hearing
about this from you and and it that was that
kind of went away, didn't it, Like the bulletproof coffee thing.
(06:21):
I heard about it for right around the time you
guys were doing it, and then I it just disappeared. Well,
I think it's still around. I think a lot of
people do what we did, and you you do it
for a little bit, maybe you know it. It forces
you to change your patterns a bit and then you realize, oh, well,
actually I don't need to put butter in my coffee,
and it tastes great, probably, but it's probably I would
(06:43):
assume fattening, right, Yeah, but part of it. I don't
want to get into the whole. There are a number
of of claims that are made about buttered coffee that
proclaimed that it hasn't almost mystical properties, which is kind
of in keeping with what we're going to talk about
the day. But ultimately the main benefit of butter coffee
that I found was that it was very filling for
(07:03):
someone who normally just has coffee and smoothie for breakfast.
So I was sustained all the way through lunch and
maybe even past lunch without needing to snack. But the
curious thing is about a summer of coffee and butter
kind of cured me of that. So now a lot
of the time I don't snack in the mornings anyway.
Oh interesting, okay, and you're back to just like coffee
(07:24):
and smoothies. Interesting, Well I might, I might give it
a shot. Yeah, and everything's worth a shot, right, maybe
ice cream and butter. Now that that, well, that might
not work so well. All right, well, let's let's kick
off by getting in a way. We're gonna get this
out of the way, because I know the one thing
that most of you are not excited about is to
(07:46):
hear about the process of creating butter. But I want
to really help frame this in a in an exciting way.
I want you to think about it not so much
as oh, you milked a cow or some other mammal
and then you transfer it. You transformed it's milk into
a solid substance that's spread herble. Think of it as
(08:06):
a series of three miracles by which one turns the
light of the sun into a pad of butter. Again,
holy butter. All right, So first, let's just give at
least passing credit to the alchemy of photosynthesis. The grass
in the field converts energy in the form of sunlight
into chemical energy in the form of sugars or other carbohydrates.
(08:27):
So that's the first miracle. Second, a female ruminant, be
it a cow, a sheep, a camel, a water buffalo,
a goat, et cetera, they consume the grass. And and truly,
as Elaine Kostrov points out in her excellent book Butter,
a Rich History, uh, you're better off thinking of it
as a of the cow or the camel, or whatever
(08:49):
the animal might be, as a mobile um harvester and
processing unit, as opposed to just an animal that's eating.
Because these ruminants that are built to transform graph into milk.
That consider the fact that they have this three or
four chambered stomach. They have an upper dental pad instead
of teeth that's perfect for for masticating the greens. Each
(09:11):
animal puts its own particular chemical spin on the process,
but they crunch up the greens and ferment them in
their mini chambered guts. Eight hours of feeding with cows,
eight hours ruminating, and then the remains of the day
are just resting. So the maceration, the repeated chewing of
the cut, uh you know, because they'll swallow it will
(09:32):
come back up. All that this helps carry out the
second miracle, okay, the transformation of a low fat diet
of grass into high fat milk. So the broken down
food is even further assaulted in the guts of the
of these creatures by microbes and this oxygen free fermentation chamber,
the grassy meal is broken down to the to its
(09:54):
very basic elements strings of carbon and hydrogen molecules, and uh,
then the other bacteria down there they recombine the elements
into volatile fatty acids. This is reminding me of a
like four eight trip I went on when I was
in elementary school. You might have had a similar experience,
or maybe somebody out there listening has uh you know.
(10:15):
They took us around like a working farm and kind
of showed us how everything worked, and there was this
one cow that had like a window. Have you seen
these in person? Yeah? Yeah, It's like it was almost
like there was a um a porthole built into its side,
and you could look inside and it's not like you're
(10:36):
watching butter being made, you know. But I was like
so fascinated with this as a kid, like, why why
would you do that? Wouldn't that hurt the cow? Like
it was so strange to me. I still to this day,
I don't really think I know why, other than it's
probably for health practices, right to make sure that everything's working, okay,
to have a window into the cow. Yeah, I mean,
I'm assuming an educational outreach. Yeah, well maybe that was.
(10:59):
It was just for us to be able to see
inside the living cow. Yeah, maybe this requires more more.
We need to come back to this. Maybe maybe someone
out there can can fill us in. Okay, So we
have this this wonderful fermentation process going on, and only
half of the fat is coming from the cow's diet.
(11:20):
The rest is coming from the cow's own body fat.
All right, So there's your second miracle. Ruminate in milk,
a fatty liquid that's that sole purpose is to ensure
the survival of the animals young or you know, you know,
for a bunch of eight creatures to steal who drink
and then process into various butters and cheeses. It's also
worth noting that the exact composition of this milk is
(11:42):
gonna vary from species to species, with additional factors depending
on environment and diet. So you produces twice the fat
content of cow milk. Goat milk has smaller, more digestible
fat molecules, a yak milk has less sugar and more protein.
Camel's milk has three times as much vitamin C and
water buffalo milk has twice the fat of cow milk.
(12:05):
What's like the weirdest type of butter you've ever had?
Because I can't. I don't think I've really experimented all
that much other than like goat butter. Probably, Yeah, I
don't think I've experimented much at all with with butters
made from different milks. The closest I've come, I guess,
is having a few different types of cheese. So yeah, right,
I've had sheep cheese, I've had goat cheese, cow cheese,
(12:26):
And if you've had actual buffalo mozzarella, then you've had
cheese made from water buffalo. Yeah. Again, the fat content,
that's why that is the premier. I love some buffalo mozzarella.
My other favorite cheese is um from a very specific
part of the world, Zacapona, Poland. They yeah, it's I
believe it's a goat cheese, but again it's just phenomenal
(12:50):
smoked cheese. Anyways, this is making me hungry, all right.
So the animals milked and then you have to make cream.
That's the next step on our way to actual butter.
And this is achieved by allowing the milk to sit
and then skimming the resulting layer of fat fat molecules
that have collected on the top. They've floated up to
the top. You skim it off, and you can make
butter from whole milk like the rest of the milk
(13:12):
in that vat. But the more assured route is via
the cream. Yeah. So, like Robert said, we're not going
to really like hold your hand and walk through the
how the how it's made kind of thing. If you
want to look at that, there's plenty of articles online.
But basically, there's just tiny fat molecules that float to
the top of this milk. They form the cream. You
(13:32):
stir them up, that's what the agitation is until they
clump together to form wondrous butter. Yeah. The cow or
the sheep or the camel, they've made this wondrous liquid
to feed their their offspring, and the humans have come
in and said, actually, we're gonna take just the very
best of that, but the very top fatty stuff, and
then we're going to process it. It seems really wasteful,
(13:54):
but then you realize that there's there's a place for
all the various left dovers as well. Yeah, because what
happens next is you you agitate or stir up the cream.
This shakes the fat molecules out of position and causes
them to clump together. Eventually, after prolonged stirring, the fat
molecules clump so much that they separate from the liquid
(14:16):
in the cream and a solid mass forms. The liquid
is buttermilk, and of course that goes on to be
used as butter milk, and the solid mass is butter.
Behold the third and final miracle. So little research I
found this that one of the earliest recipes for butter
involved putting the milk or the cream inside an animal
(14:36):
skin and just suspending it and letting it swing back
and forth until butter formed. Uh. Today, to qualify as butter,
it has to contain at least eight butter fat with
no more than sixteen water and two percent milk solids.
And you need twenty one pounds of cow's milk to
(14:57):
make one pound of butter. So to get it to
be that consistent yellow that we're all used to, it's
actually artificially colored. And this is important it will come
back around later when we talk about margarine. The way
they do that is with something called a nato, which
is a food coloring that comes from the seeds of
I believe it's pronounced the aquiote tree. So it's not
(15:18):
as yellow as we're used to. That's a food coloring
that's added to it. Okay, so that's super yellow butter.
So you know, at this point, like you said, we
could go into greater detail about the chemistry of of
what's going on here, but but hopefully this will give
you just a fresh uh and new idea of what's
going on Again. I love that idea that solar energy
(15:39):
has become fatty, delicious butter has become this ultimately the
super food, this this premiere of food stuff that and
you'll you'll realize why it becomes so valuable to the
humans who obsess about it. Well, and I know some
of you out there are wondering this because I was
when I was doing the research. So, if butter comes
from milk, is there human butter? And what does that
(16:01):
taste like? The answer is yes, I don't know what
it tastes like, but yes there is human butter. In fact,
just two years ago, a woman experimented with her own
breast milk and shared photos on Reddit of the butter
that she created, and it caused a little bit of
a stir. The week that she did this, there were
people were freaking out, either saying, oh my god, this
(16:22):
is so cool or oh my god, that's so disgusting.
But yeah, you know, same process works with human milk. Now,
in her defense, there are people who seem to freak
out when they realize that human breast milk exists. Oh yeah, yeah,
absolutely my people. I mean, of course, men, I got
and that was a segment of the male population who
(16:42):
seems to want to remain in complete denial. There definitely
seemed to be like some people that were like, that
is the most disgusting thing ever, I don't want to
have anything to do with it. And then the other
side was, oh, my god, I want to try that.
That's kind of that's kind of the divide and most reddit. Yeah,
reddit known for its diversity in opinions. Yeah, alright, we're
gonna take our first break and when we come back,
(17:04):
we're getting going to get into this idea of holy butter.
We're gonna run through various examples from different cultures throughout history, Uh,
the way that they've obsessed about this substance. Alright, we're back.
So the word butter actually comes from the ancient Greek
(17:25):
combination of boo and turan, which means couches. Makes sense. Uh, Now,
we're going to go through a couple of different uses
religious experience uses of butter throughout many cultures around the world.
First one we talked about here was Tibetan butter, and
(17:45):
I couldn't find a lot on this, so I'd love
to know if anybody else out there has heard about it.
But apparently, uh, it's used in the embalming of bodies,
or at least it was used in the embalming of
bodies on the those of deceased Lamas and they basically
would simmer their corpses in boiling butter. And these are
(18:06):
Tibetan Buddhist holy men. Yeah, not actual lamas of anyone
out there, just to be clear, right, Yeah, although that
would be a great lama recipe probably, yeah. Uh. On this,
On the this subject of funeral butter usage, I did
run across the fact that in ancient Egypt. Of course,
(18:27):
ancient Egyptians were known for their elaborate rights of embalming.
We've discussed this a bit on the show and a
couple of episodes at least. And they used various things.
I mean, they seem to have used pretty much everything
in this practice. Anything you get their hands on. It
could be used to preserve the corpse and give it
a lifelike appearance. Uh. And they would use butter, along
(18:50):
with soldust and sand, as a way to plump up
desiccated flesh, either by stuffing it into the mouth or
through incisions in the skin. For some reason, that may
a lot of sense to me, only in the sense
of that, like, I know, a lot of plastic surgery
now involves injecting animal fat into skin. So like, if
you're going to try to form flesh somehow, whether it's
(19:12):
dead or alive, that seems like a natural place to go. Right, Yeah,
I mean, especially for the ancient Egyptians, who I believe
we've mentioned on the show before. We're we're we have
some of the earliest examples of what is essentially plastic surgery. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So then what about Buddha butter? This sounds like somebody's
got a patent that if they haven't already, I'm sure
(19:34):
there's probably some company out there already a picture of
the smiling Buddha with a stick of butter in his hands. Uh. Well,
years ago, there were butter sculptures called tomas, which were
made to celebrate Shakya mooney Buddha's victories. Now today there's
actually still an annual butter festival that's celebrated in March
(19:55):
as part of the Mono Lam Festival, I believe that's
how you say it. And at this festival, thousands of
butter lamps are lit, and these signify the wisdom and
light of the Buddha. These are made from clarified yak
butter and they line the streets. Now, donating such butter
to the monasteries is actually believed to bring good karma
because these they allows the monks to craft the lamps
(20:18):
for this holiday. So there's another one. Yeah, this one
is fascinating. Uh. In that KOs Rova book that I mentioned,
butter a rich history. She goes into it at at
in depth, and I'm not going to attempt to to
share everything here. If you want to read more about it,
you should definitely pick that book up. But she she
says that the we have this modern tradition of creating
(20:42):
these thomas, and uh, these the modern tradition dates back
probably go around, but I think this those refer specifically
to the version that's fives today and not that that
earlier tradition that you alluded to. So turma as you
mentioned to additionally yak butter, but they'll also mix in
(21:03):
roasted barley flour or sampa uh and then sometimes wax
as i'll describe here. So traditionally this is crazy that
the monk would use only yak butter with the sampa,
and they would form a range of shapes and designs
for tantric rituals and offerings, and the monks would have
to cool their fingers uh, and to sculpt the butter clay,
(21:25):
they continually dip their fingers or the clay itself into
a bowl of cold water or the snow. And often
they would be working in like a really cold room,
so it would be super tough. Where this is not
just a thing where someone would grab some butter and
you know, a small bowl of cold water and then oops,
have got to work around with a little bit and look,
I made a sculpture. Now they would spend months on this,
(21:47):
and the artist would often suffer illness, frost bite, arthritis
and uh. And then at the end of all this,
the sculpture is just going to melt away in the spring.
So it's this this perfect symbol of of impermanence, much
like the Tibetan practice of crafting mandalas out of multi
colored sand. Wow. Well, all right, so it's easy to
(22:08):
do this in Tibet because it's cold there. What happens
if you I'm gonna jump ahead in the notes here,
what happens if you want to sculpt butter here in America?
Because it's a thing, it's not wholly necessarily but the
butter cow. I mean, has anybody out there seen a
butter cow before? I'm talking about a life sized butter
(22:29):
sculpture of a cow. Uh. It might strike close to
home for some of our listeners. You might have I
first heard about the butter cow on The West Wing
when the character C. J. Craig does this whole celebration
talking about how great the butter cow is. But it
was actually first sculpted in nineteen eleven by J. K.
Daniels at the Iowa State Fair. And you basically start
(22:52):
with wood, metal wire, and steel mesh to frame the
six pounds slab of low moisture, pure cream Iowa butter.
That's what at least that's what the Iowa State Fair says. Um.
They put that in a forty degree cooler and apply
more layers of butter until you've made a life sized cow.
Now some of you out there going, whoa, that's a
(23:14):
lot of butter that's wasted. Well, unlike the Tibetan practice
that we were just talking about earlier, this butter is
supposedly recycled and reused for up to ten years after. Yeah,
but it's interesting like present day, we can put them
inside a big cooler, but in Tibet they had to
go outside with cold water and they're getting sick. But
(23:36):
they're like still doing the same kind of you know,
aesthetic practice. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's it's interesting
too to note that eventually you have Tibetan monks that
are engaging in this practice moving down into warmer portions
of India. So how do you do this if you're
if if it's a you know, a warmer climate, right,
(23:57):
Monks now residing in India are often forced to use
or margarine mixed with paraffint wax. So that's where the
wax comes in, okay, and that probably helps keep it
all together. Yeah. Now, another Um Eastern tradition, I ran across,
comes from Chinese Buddhism. According to Chinese Buddhist master Tie
and Tae, the successive states of soul transformations in reincarnation
(24:21):
basically line up with the stages in the transformation from
from milk to gee. And I think that fits in
rather nicely with what we read in the opening. You know,
this idea that in the same way that that a
soul may go from life to life to life, and
it's kind of this refining process ideally as you work
towards a complete removal from the wheel of death and rebirth.
(24:42):
Also we're seeing this, you know, the sunlight, the grass,
everything moving towards butter as the guess the human achievement. Yeah, uh, well,
it's interesting because you know when you read up on
butter and people talk about like the ancient practices involving it,
most always they bring up the Bible because it's like
one of our most read modern texts that references but
(25:06):
are quite a bit. Yeah, there's there's one part in
particular that's uh, that's that's worth pointing out, you know,
not just for the Bible also, I mean basically Abrahamic
tradition as as a whole, because it conserves Abraham. He's
a preparing food for three angels of the Lord who
are visiting in Genesis eighteen. And if you think back
to our our John d episode, we're talking angels of
(25:27):
the Lord here. These are these are terrifying, beautiful beings.
They've taken human form, sure, but these are these are
the guys that the way, you know, lay waste to cities. Yeah,
what else are you gonna give them? Would welcome them
with the butter? Yeah, they said, hey, Sarah, help me
fetch the bread and butter. We've got three angels of
the Lord coming. And it worked out. They apparently thought
(25:49):
the butter was delightful, good, it's probably carried gold. They're
not paying you gotta pull out the best stuff and
the angels of the Lord. Well, that leads me to
a totally opposite, unrelated to the Bible butter cultural phenomenon,
and that is the Yule Lads of Iceland. Now, Joe,
(26:12):
our co host, insisted that we had to bring this up.
You recommended it to us. We've talked about the Yule
Lads before. I think it was maybe last year's Christmas
episode we were talking about them. But if you don't
recall that the basic gist is in Icelandic lore, uh
instead of or maybe it's along with Santa Claus. I'm
not quite sure. There's thirteen children who visit Iceland's Kids
(26:36):
during the thirteen nights prior to Christmas, one each night,
and they have these amazing names. There's all kinds of
of Ule Lads like Sausage sniffer and door liquor, but
there is one that is specifically related to Butter, and
his name is Butter Greedy. At least that's what it
translates as. Uh. So, the gist is that you're supposed
(26:58):
to put a shoe out on your window sill and
if you're good, each day, a fule lad will leave
you candy in the shoe, but if you're bad, they
fill it up with rotting to potatoes, rotting potatoes. And
so I'm wondering about butter greedy, like presumably he eats
all your butter if you're bad, and he also puts
(27:18):
rotting potatoes inside your shoe. But it immediately popped to
Joe's mind when we said, hey, we're doing this episode
on butter, and he was like, there's gotta be a
ule lad And he was right, there was, Yeah, because
in a bit we're gonna talk about some other um
superstitions and folk beliefs that line up with this idea
of protecting that butter from you know, real world thiefs,
(27:39):
but also supernatural threats because this is this, this is
a super food stuff and especially in you know, in
the winter, you're gonna need this to survive, right, I mean,
think about how much work goes into making it, especially
like when you're when you're not talking about an industrialized process, right,
like you're making it by hand, Like you're gonna really
(28:00):
covet and and uh conserve this stuff. Yeah, indeed, I
mean survival um, real quick before we move on, I
want to point out that Lord Krishna in Hinduism, there's
a you know, a noble, important figure in so many
of the epics, but it's uh, there's also this tradition
of young Krishna kind of like baby Krishna. You may
(28:22):
have a number of you may have seen pictures because
he's depicted is basically this blue baby. I kind of
remember this. And he's a trickster and he's always getting
into mischief and one of the things he would do
is steel butter. Oh okay, well that's quasi related to
the next instance of butter, which a lot of you
are probably familiar with, and that's g uh. My wife
uses ge all the time and cooking essentially in Hindu sacrifices.
(28:45):
Though during the Vedic period, g it was created because
it's a kind of clarified butter that's made with various
grains and vegetables, and back then it was thought to
satisfy the hunger of the gods who would ensure order,
that make sure order was maintained on earth. And there
was a ritual called Jottak Carmon that was performed at
(29:05):
the birth of a boy and involved presenting the baby
with ge, honey and gold. Alright, so some of you
out there probably wondering, well, clarified butter I like that.
What's the difference between that and ge or what's traditionally
called it was leaky. Well, they've both been made by
melting butter over low heat, allowing the water content to
evaporate so that the milk solids settle to the bottom
(29:27):
of the pand then what you do is you you
skim the surface, you clear the fat. It's poured off
and the residue is discarded. But here's the difference. Clarified
butter has the fat poured off as soon as possible.
That way, it keeps the milk solids from browning. For
it was le ge, the butter is simmered until the
solids are golden browned. And this is what gives it
(29:48):
this nutty flavor. I'm sure many of you out there,
if you've if you've had Indian food, you're probably familiar
with this flavor. You might not know that it's ge,
but it's it's a it's delightful um. And the vegetable
that was mentioned earlier, that's actually made from hydrogenated vegetable
oils um and it basically resembles shortening. And then another
(30:08):
one that Joe brought to our attention, This is a
weird one. He started talking about this yesterday and I
got a little nauseous, uh, And then I did the
research on it. Bog butter. Yeah, this one originally came
up a little bit in our our research for the
episode we did about ritual regicide and this idea that
that you would have certain ancient cultures that would ritually
(30:34):
murder kings or failed kings, you know, rulers or failed rulers.
And one of the examples comes up in these these
early European cultures that would utilize the bogs. You would
find these bodies and the bogs that had been ritually
murdered because the bog was not it wasn't just a
place you dumped something you wanted to get rid of.
This isn't like the mafia taking somebody out to a
swamp and dumping them. This the bog was a sacred
(30:57):
place and it was a place where it was you know,
it's a fitting spot to deposit to the body of
a king that had been killed in a sacrifice, especially
because of its preservative qualities. It makes me think like
it's interesting, like bogs were sort of to Ireland in Scotland,
what the very arid desert was for ancient Egypt. It
(31:19):
results in mummification, which is why we know so much
about the Bog people and in this case, bog butter.
So you're probably going, wait, what is bog butter? What
does that have to do with dead kings buried in bogs? Well,
four hundred thirty samples of bog butter have been excavated
from Pete bogs in Ireland and Scotland and they date
back as early as four hundred BC. Basically, it's buried
(31:43):
several feet deep in these bogs in huge quantities. Uh.
And I first thing that popped in my mind was
is this just like raw butter? Or is it in something?
And we turned to an academic article about it and
it's it turns out it's Uh, it's either just a
lump of butter, like a big lump of butter, or
(32:06):
it's in a container that's usually made of wood, or
it might be wrapped in animal bladders. And you're probably going,
why are these people? Okay, I get why they're preserving
their dead kings but why are they dropping butter in
the bog. Well, it's probably because the bogs have a
well documented ability to preserve that. And butter was really valuable.
I mean it was so valuable that it was used
(32:28):
to pay rent and taxes, and in some areas it
was actually used to help waterproof fabric, and it was
used in everything from building materials to candles. So burying
it in a bog while you could have been doing
that to preserve it, or or maybe it was a
way to change its flavor. And I wrote next to
this in the notes because I'm thinking, like, what does
(32:49):
bog butter taste like? It's so it seems like nobody's
really eating bog butter. I mean maybe they have, but
I don't think it's like the ideas, like you dig
it up thousands of years later and it's so much better,
you know, Like, it's not like that. But the butter.
Here's the other thing. It was also thought to cure illness.
So some people placed it next to a person who
is ill at the time, and they thought it might
(33:12):
absorb their disease. But what happens if the victim dies, Well,
then you take that butter and you bury it in
the ball. Okay, so maybe you really shouldn't eat that
butter then, because it's filled with butter. Yeah, exactly, man,
that should be like a that should have been like
a full Moon Entertainment directed DVD movie like Attack of
the Bog. Better, if there's still time, there's still I
(33:34):
can see it like moving and crawling around, maybe even
animating a butter cow. Oh oh yeah, that's the culminating
scene as a butter cow comes to life and chases
somebody into the bog. All right, let's see what else
we have here real quick in passing that, if we
did find an African example in remote regions of Ethiopia,
(33:57):
there's still some cultural use where of butter, where the
bride to be is lacquered with butter and red clay,
kind of you know, a preparation for marriage. But one
of the more fascinating examples that we came across, and
this ties back into this idea of butter theft. Are
these just various traditions and beliefs that are where one
(34:21):
would protect the butter or attempt to steal butter through magic.
So in Norwegian, uh, it's something called the small cat
or the butter cat and uh it's a bajara, I
believe in Swedish and a tilberry or snucker in Icelandic.
(34:41):
It was a creature of spun yarn that you know,
I'm sorcerer would make and uh it sucked milk from
other people's cows and returned it to its master. Butter
homunculi made of yarn. That's pretty cool. That's crazy. And
there's like a whole tradition of various like thread based uh,
weaving based magic. Very very curious because when you think
(35:05):
about the creation, the creation aspect of all of this,
like we're talking about using one like a magical use
of one technology to tap into another technology, right. Yeah.
So I've also read and of course you know traditions
are going to vary, but I've I've read some accounts
that the til barry was created from a human rib
dug up from a graveyard and brought to life when
(35:28):
the commune when communion wine is spit on it three
sundays in a row. This is again, this has to
be in our butter horror movie. So you take a
human rib, you spit on it for three weeks, and
then you presumably you've ad yarn, and then you've got
your butter homunculous cat being that goes and steals butter
(35:49):
yea or milk, at least milk, but the but the
butter is still very much at risk. And so you
have all these magical protections that are utilized to protect
the butter, including the magical butter not And this was
a symbol that was used to magically protect a butter
in Icelandic traditions. And uh, I had an image of
it that it kind of looks like what a pentacle,
(36:11):
except one that is kind of skewed so that the
base is is broader and wider than the top, so
it looks like, you know, a kid misdrew a pentagon
or something. So this is a symbol that's drawn near
the butter to protect it, or is it is it
drawn in butter um? I think both understanding is that
(36:33):
had kind of varied. You would just the symbol had
to be associated with the butter. But I did see
some other examples of various things you would do to
the butter to safeguard it, including one right that involved
driving a rusty nail from a coffin into the side
of your butter. That would protect it from going bad
or being stolen. Interesting, all right, Yeah, I'm just collecting
(36:56):
more ideas for my butter movie now. Yeah, and and
I if anyone out there really wants to make a
go at the butter horror movie again, check out that
book by A. Lane Kosa Rova, Butter at a Rich History.
It's in print right now, it's in digital form. I
can't recommend it strongly enough, best butter book you'll ever read.
On that note, let's take a quick break, our final break,
(37:16):
and then when we come back we will discuss butter
and war. All right, we've returned. So we started off
by talking about that doctor Seus's story about the butter War,
and it sounded vaguely ridiculous, right, that these two cultures
(37:37):
would fight each other over which side of the bread
they would put their butter on. Yeah, it was the
UK versus Zooks. And his one propaganda poster in the
book reminds us, yuks are not zooks, keep your butter
side up. And it sounds crazy, but we came pretty
close to something similar here in the US. Maybe not
a war necessarily, but there was some hysteria for sure
(38:01):
surrounding butter. Uh. And it all started in France. In
eighteen sixty nine, Emperor Louis Napoleon the Third offered a
prize to whoever could make a low priced version of
butter for the lower classes and for the military, So
it was butter butter for war. The winner people, Oh yeah, exactly.
(38:23):
The winner was French chemist I'm going to get this
name wrong, Hippolyte Maje Moray uh. And he invented margarine,
which we all know and used today. Yeah, it's pretty
interesting how he figured it out because he basically made
that connection that we we pointed out earlier that a
lot of the fat is coming from the animal itself, right,
so he said, why not process it from the animal itself? Yeah,
(38:45):
it's made from well, at least his version was made
from beef tallow um. And he sold this patent to
the Jurgen's Butter making company and they eventually became part
of Unilever, and Uni Lever is still one of the
world's leading producers of margarine. So when it arrived here
in the US in the eighteen seventies, there was a
(39:06):
political economic battle between manufacturers of margarine and manufacturers of butter,
and it led to In eight six, the federal government
had to pass the Margarine Act, which put a restrictive
tax on margarine and demanded that its manufacturers pay a
prohibitive licensing fee. This is a quote from the article
(39:30):
that I read about it in National Geographic. It said
pro butter political cartoonists pictured factories dropping everything from stray
cats to soap paint, arsenic and rubber boots into the
margarine mix, and a barrage of dubious scientific reports hinted
that margarine caused cancer or possibly lead to insanity. What's
(39:51):
that remind us of that we just talked about also
from this same period of time, Green tea. Yeah, he
but we're saying that it made you crazy, it made
you hallucinate, or it was ultimately because the manufacturers were
putting illicit substances in it, like iron filings. But in
this sense, the cartoonists, I think this was propaganda. I
(40:14):
don't think necessarily that this margarine had a stray cat
dropped into it. But why did this happen? Well, Okay
State politicians began fighting over the color of margarine. They
were saying that coloring yellow was false advertising because margarine
is naturally white. It's made from tallow and that's after
(40:34):
it's processing. But thirty two states here in the US
passed laws to demand that margarine be dyed pink instead
of yellow, and the Supreme Court actually had to intervene
and they overturned the laws because they said, look, it's
illegal to enforce the adulteration of food. Yeah, that's it
(40:55):
sounds like some straight up Dr SEUs nonsense right there,
The idea that someone would say, actually, you're to sell
that margarine, you gotta die at pink. Yeah, it's just
straight up right out of the doctor's But clearly must
have inspired this story. They must have known about it.
But yeah, it's just crazy to me. You know. I
think about like all the insanity that's going on in
(41:16):
our government right now and the back and forth like
haggling and kind of just nasty rhetoric, and it feels like, oh,
this is just a product of today, and then you
look back a hundred hundred and fifty years ago and
you're like, oh no, Like it was just as silly
people were yelling at each other about making margarine pink. Yeah,
yeah you can, because I can imagine the way like
modern headlines and social media would pick up on it like, oh,
(41:39):
this legislator just introduced a bill to die all of
our marjarine pink, what's going on exactly? So all right,
you think this story is over, it's not. By the
time we get to World War two, the United States
needs margarine because the depression in the war have led
to butters shortages. Like we said, bondared, it's a valued commodity.
(41:59):
So argarine became more palatable to Americans because it was
made with hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of animal fats like
the one we were just talking about with the gee. Yeah,
so that's interesting. But during the war, margarine was even
sold with capsules of yellow food coloring to get past
(42:19):
all the fury about dying. So it came white, but
then you would add the yellow so when you put
it out on your table, it looked like butter. Except
in Wisconsin. Wisconsin wasn't having any of this because using
yellow margarine in Wisconsin was a crime that was punishable
by fines or imprisonment. Oh goodness. So you look at
(42:43):
the Yuks and the Zooks and you think, well, that
couldn't happen. Well, we got pretty close. We we were
at least imprisoning people and finding them in one state
in the United States for how they used butter and
or Margarine. Well, you know, to bring it all back
around to the Yuks and the Zooks and the Butter
(43:03):
Battle Book. Uh and and as I was getting ready
with my notes for this episode, I ended up going
to the library checking out a copy of this book
because we have a number of sus books in the house,
but we don't have the Butter Battle Book. So I thought, all,
I need to read this to my son. He loves
Dr sus I love Dr Susy. Did you like it?
He liked it? He had he had questions about it,
(43:24):
questions that I could only vaguely answer because the spoiler.
But the book ends with a standoff as this arms
race over how how best to spread your butter has
led to essentially the development of these little pill sized
nuclear weapons, and the Yuks and the Zooks are to
standoff who's going to drop theirs first? And and other
(43:47):
other Yuks and Zooks are going into bomb shelters, and
it's it confronts mutually assured destruction, the idea that have
nuclear weapons are ever deployed. Uh. In a in a
large scale manner, you just gonna be complete destruction on
both sides, not to mention environmental um destruction as well.
So I haven't read the book, but I watched the
(44:09):
cartoon version this morning, and if it's similar, what really
impressed me was that it's a story that doesn't hold
your hand or a child's hand by saying like, this
is what you're supposed to learn from this, because both
sides are hysterical in their rhetoric against one another and
how they use butter, and they basically are amping up
(44:29):
their their technology in the like kind of silly Dr
Seuss like weaponry way right there, like weird sling shots
and the things that catch sling shots and throw them back.
But like it's it's interesting in the cartoon because it's
like a father telling his son like, this is why
we hate them, this is why you have to destroy them,
and here's my personal story as to why. And usually
(44:52):
in a children's cartoon or a story like that, you go, oh, well,
that's the authoritative figure. I will listen to him, and
I will learn a lesson from him. But the lesson
to be earned is like these people are all crazy
and they're they're gonna end up killing each other. Yeah,
Like you read seuses the Lorax and they have that
wonderful environmental message at the end. It's also kind of
darth that says, look, the things are bad and it's
(45:13):
up to you to to change it and make it better.
And here's something you can do, Like it's all symbolized
in the planning of the seed. You can plant more trees,
you can care about the environment, and we might be
able to reclaim some of what's lost. But at the
end of the butter Battle Book, there's no suggestion. It
just shows you, like how crazy the world has gotten
and what kind of state we're in. And SEUs doesn't
(45:35):
have an answer, so totally I bastion being like, um so,
who was right the yooks or the zooks or what
am I supposed to do? It raises a lot of
a lot of questions, uh, And it's I was tempted
to say what It raises more questions now And it's
more of a potent story now because we have this
renewed discussion of a potential nuclear arms race and and
(46:00):
and nuclear tensions once more. But this is but it's
never This is a story that's never become unimportant, like right,
I don't think it'll ever be passe, right, Like you
and I will be deadened in the ground two hundred
years from now. The butter Battle Book in the bottom.
Maybe yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah, yeah, it's still it's
still a wonderful book, but also a terrifying book for adults,
(46:23):
because the threat of nuclear war is terrifying and the
threat hasn't gone away. And so in continuing this this
effort to to highlight nonprofits organizations that depend on donations
on our our episodes, I wanted to do a call
out to the Arms Control Association. Okay, you can find
them at arms control dot org. They were founded in
(46:45):
nineteen one. They're in national, nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to
promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies,
so that they have public education and media programs. It
has a magazin seen arms Control Today. They provide policymakers,
the press, and just the interested public with authoritative information, analysis,
(47:08):
and commentary on arms control proposal proposals, negotiation negotiations and agreements,
and related national security issues. So maybe that's what you
do if you've got a kid who reads the Butter
battle Book and says, I don't know what I'm supposed
to do. I suspect the Arms Control Association probably has
some media materials that, at least for us as adults,
(47:28):
helps us to sort of better think about arms races
and mutually assured destruction. Indeed, so there we go from
from butter to mutually assured destruction. That's what we bring
you here. I Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
And hey, also, I want to know some answers because
we couldn't find them here. If you know what human
(47:48):
butter tastes like, I want to know if you know
what bog butter tastes like. I want to know what's
the weirdest butter that you've had, like from from an animal. Uh,
there's all kinds of places to tell us. You can
on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.
You can write us at blow the Mind on all
of those platforms, or you can go visit stuff to
(48:09):
Blow your Mind dot com if you want to learn
more about mutually assured destruction or butter. Well, that's where
we've got all of our podcasts, We've got all of
our videos, every blog post that we've ever written. Check
it out. Yeah, and as always, you can reach out
to us you want to. You want more episodes they
focus on food products you wan't want on cheese, Let
us know you want some more episodes that focus on
(48:31):
the threat of nuclear annihilation. Let us know we can
do that as well. We walk both sides of the
street here at stuff to blow your mind. Send us
an email, let us know at blow the mind at
how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and
(48:53):
thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com.
The tame big I think them four stout far far
(49:15):
f
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault. This time we're pulling
an episode from January. This is an episode that you
did with Christian. Yeah, this was a pretty fun one
that I figured would be a good one to pull
back out because it's the science of holy butter. It's
(00:26):
it's some of the parts I remember the most. Or
we're just talking about what butter is and how it's
kind of amazing, the the saga that it goes through
because it's essentially sunlight. It is sunlight transformed through a
few different processes into a lump of substance that you
have in your refrigerator. Well, I guess that's true of
(00:47):
pretty much all our food. But yes, but but it
looks like sight. It looks like sunlight, you know, it
has it seems to shine and uh and also we
get into some of the sacred ideas wrap up in
butter and uh and and all of this. A lot
of this is spring boarding off of an excellent butter
book that will reference in the episode. All right, well,
(01:09):
butter up. Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from
how Stuff Works dot Com. I'll this is the secret
name of butter, tongue of the gods navel of immortality.
(01:32):
We will proclaim the name of butter. We will sustain
it in this sacrifice by bowing low. These waves of
butter flow like gazelles before the hunter. Streams of butter
caress the burning wood agne. The fire loves them and
is satisfied. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
(01:59):
My name is Robert la and my name is Christian Seger.
Bow at the feet of butter. Yeah, I thought we
needed a nice regal opening there. And that is a
quote from the rig Veda. Uh. This is from around
fifteen hundred b CE. So we're going to really dive
into butter. The episode I wanted to do like an
(02:19):
episode title called Holy Butter Batman that it seems like
that might fit the best. But we we are going
to talk about religious uses of butter. We're also going
to talk about the basics food science of preparing butter,
and then butter war, which is a very real thing,
in fact, so real that it's generated a satirical uh
(02:44):
children's book all about butter. Yes, I imagine a number
of you were familiar with this. It is a Dr
Seuss The butter Battle Book published in and it's a
It is a satire that tackled the very serious topic
of cold wool or the nuclear arms race and mutually
assured destruction. It is the only children's book that I've
(03:06):
run across that ends with the contemplation of mutually assured
nuclear destruction. Yeah, I uh, you know, I was not
familiar with this specific Dr SEUs book until today. And
I watched the Ralph Backshet animated version on YouTube this
morning in coporation for this, and it blew my mind.
It was like, I I wonder how it would have
(03:28):
changed me as a person if I had seen this
when I was like four or five years old. You know, Yeah,
I don't think I saw it when I was a kid.
And this is the this animated version, by the way,
narrated by Charles Dearning. Of anyone else who's not familiar
with it, you can you should be able to find
it on YouTube. Yeah, it was everywhere, and it's yeah,
it's such an interesting story because to to a kid,
it's just a goofy tale involving these bird like people
(03:51):
and the basic plot here is you have a cold
war between two factions. One side firmly believes that you
put your butter on top of the toast, on top
of the bread, and then the other side, on the
other side of this big wall, they believe you put
the butter on the bottom of the bread. And that
sounds ridiculous and would never happen with real human beings.
(04:11):
And yet when we talk about margarine and butter and
what happened with them in the nineteenth century going into
the twentieth century, not that long ago. Uh, it's not
that far apart. Yeah. I think one of the things
about butter is that today especially we just take it
completely for granted. It's maybe a little less if you
you buy really good butter, or you you get involved
(04:34):
in a in a you know, a love affair with
with with coffee with butter in it, with bulletproof coffee
like that. But for the most part, you know, it's
just this is yellow stuff that's maybe delicious and and
certainly has a huge role in so many different recipes,
and large quantities of it go into most you know,
restaurant foods to make it delightful. But we don't think
(04:55):
about the wonder of butter. We don't think about the
alchemy of butter and the miracle butter, and it's easy
to forget that we have all of these wonderful examples
from human history, where where as our their introduction suggests
there is there is something divine about butter. Well, it's
certainly tastes great. And I don't think I've ever met
(05:16):
a person who says they don't like butter, you know,
like everyone likes butter. It's it's butter. It's great, it
tastes great. But um, when you may not use better
for you know, even they made an ethical or dietary choice, right, yeah, totally,
but but still it tastes, tastes lovely. Uh. It's funny
you mentioned like the taste of it and like it
(05:38):
being so ubiquitous because you're right, Like I use butter
every day in cooking somewhere or another. Uh, and I
just kind of always get the generic store brand, you know.
And then my wife recently splurged and she bought that
carry gold Irish butter that like, it's really really good,
kind of expensive butter, and it I like reserve of
(06:00):
it for special things, like I don't don't just cook
with carry gold butter, you know, like like that's that's special. Yeah,
we got into that better. Alam back, my wife and
I when we we briefly did we did like a
summer of the coffee butter concoction. Yeah. I remember hearing
about this from you and and it that was that
kind of went away, didn't it, Like the bulletproof coffee thing.
(06:21):
I heard about it for right around the time you
guys were doing it, and then I it just disappeared. Well,
I think it's still around. I think a lot of
people do what we did, and you you do it
for a little bit, maybe you know it. It forces
you to change your patterns a bit and then you realize, oh, well,
actually I don't need to put butter in my coffee,
and it tastes great, probably, but it's probably I would
(06:43):
assume fattening, right, Yeah, but part of it. I don't
want to get into the whole. There are a number
of of claims that are made about buttered coffee that
proclaimed that it hasn't almost mystical properties, which is kind
of in keeping with what we're going to talk about
the day. But ultimately the main benefit of butter coffee
that I found was that it was very filling for
(07:03):
someone who normally just has coffee and smoothie for breakfast.
So I was sustained all the way through lunch and
maybe even past lunch without needing to snack. But the
curious thing is about a summer of coffee and butter
kind of cured me of that. So now a lot
of the time I don't snack in the mornings anyway.
Oh interesting, okay, and you're back to just like coffee
(07:24):
and smoothies. Interesting, Well I might, I might give it
a shot. Yeah, and everything's worth a shot, right, maybe
ice cream and butter. Now that that, well, that might
not work so well. All right, well, let's let's kick
off by getting in a way. We're gonna get this
out of the way, because I know the one thing
that most of you are not excited about is to
(07:46):
hear about the process of creating butter. But I want
to really help frame this in a in an exciting way.
I want you to think about it not so much
as oh, you milked a cow or some other mammal
and then you transfer it. You transformed it's milk into
a solid substance that's spread herble. Think of it as
(08:06):
a series of three miracles by which one turns the
light of the sun into a pad of butter. Again,
holy butter. All right, So first, let's just give at
least passing credit to the alchemy of photosynthesis. The grass
in the field converts energy in the form of sunlight
into chemical energy in the form of sugars or other carbohydrates.
(08:27):
So that's the first miracle. Second, a female ruminant, be
it a cow, a sheep, a camel, a water buffalo,
a goat, et cetera, they consume the grass. And and truly,
as Elaine Kostrov points out in her excellent book Butter,
a Rich History, uh, you're better off thinking of it
as a of the cow or the camel, or whatever
(08:49):
the animal might be, as a mobile um harvester and
processing unit, as opposed to just an animal that's eating.
Because these ruminants that are built to transform graph into milk.
That consider the fact that they have this three or
four chambered stomach. They have an upper dental pad instead
of teeth that's perfect for for masticating the greens. Each
(09:11):
animal puts its own particular chemical spin on the process,
but they crunch up the greens and ferment them in
their mini chambered guts. Eight hours of feeding with cows,
eight hours ruminating, and then the remains of the day
are just resting. So the maceration, the repeated chewing of
the cut, uh you know, because they'll swallow it will
(09:32):
come back up. All that this helps carry out the
second miracle, okay, the transformation of a low fat diet
of grass into high fat milk. So the broken down
food is even further assaulted in the guts of the
of these creatures by microbes and this oxygen free fermentation chamber,
the grassy meal is broken down to the to its
(09:54):
very basic elements strings of carbon and hydrogen molecules, and uh,
then the other bacteria down there they recombine the elements
into volatile fatty acids. This is reminding me of a
like four eight trip I went on when I was
in elementary school. You might have had a similar experience,
or maybe somebody out there listening has uh you know.
(10:15):
They took us around like a working farm and kind
of showed us how everything worked, and there was this
one cow that had like a window. Have you seen
these in person? Yeah? Yeah, It's like it was almost
like there was a um a porthole built into its side,
and you could look inside and it's not like you're
(10:36):
watching butter being made, you know. But I was like
so fascinated with this as a kid, like, why why
would you do that? Wouldn't that hurt the cow? Like
it was so strange to me. I still to this day,
I don't really think I know why, other than it's
probably for health practices, right to make sure that everything's working, okay,
to have a window into the cow. Yeah, I mean,
I'm assuming an educational outreach. Yeah, well maybe that was.
(10:59):
It was just for us to be able to see
inside the living cow. Yeah, maybe this requires more more.
We need to come back to this. Maybe maybe someone
out there can can fill us in. Okay, So we
have this this wonderful fermentation process going on, and only
half of the fat is coming from the cow's diet.
(11:20):
The rest is coming from the cow's own body fat.
All right, So there's your second miracle. Ruminate in milk,
a fatty liquid that's that sole purpose is to ensure
the survival of the animals young or you know, you know,
for a bunch of eight creatures to steal who drink
and then process into various butters and cheeses. It's also
worth noting that the exact composition of this milk is
(11:42):
gonna vary from species to species, with additional factors depending
on environment and diet. So you produces twice the fat
content of cow milk. Goat milk has smaller, more digestible
fat molecules, a yak milk has less sugar and more protein.
Camel's milk has three times as much vitamin C and
water buffalo milk has twice the fat of cow milk.
(12:05):
What's like the weirdest type of butter you've ever had?
Because I can't. I don't think I've really experimented all
that much other than like goat butter. Probably, Yeah, I
don't think I've experimented much at all with with butters
made from different milks. The closest I've come, I guess,
is having a few different types of cheese. So yeah, right,
I've had sheep cheese, I've had goat cheese, cow cheese,
(12:26):
And if you've had actual buffalo mozzarella, then you've had
cheese made from water buffalo. Yeah. Again, the fat content,
that's why that is the premier. I love some buffalo mozzarella.
My other favorite cheese is um from a very specific
part of the world, Zacapona, Poland. They yeah, it's I
believe it's a goat cheese, but again it's just phenomenal
(12:50):
smoked cheese. Anyways, this is making me hungry, all right.
So the animals milked and then you have to make cream.
That's the next step on our way to actual butter.
And this is achieved by allowing the milk to sit
and then skimming the resulting layer of fat fat molecules
that have collected on the top. They've floated up to
the top. You skim it off, and you can make
butter from whole milk like the rest of the milk
(13:12):
in that vat. But the more assured route is via
the cream. Yeah. So, like Robert said, we're not going
to really like hold your hand and walk through the
how the how it's made kind of thing. If you
want to look at that, there's plenty of articles online.
But basically, there's just tiny fat molecules that float to
the top of this milk. They form the cream. You
(13:32):
stir them up, that's what the agitation is until they
clump together to form wondrous butter. Yeah. The cow or
the sheep or the camel, they've made this wondrous liquid
to feed their their offspring, and the humans have come
in and said, actually, we're gonna take just the very
best of that, but the very top fatty stuff, and
then we're going to process it. It seems really wasteful,
(13:54):
but then you realize that there's there's a place for
all the various left dovers as well. Yeah, because what
happens next is you you agitate or stir up the cream.
This shakes the fat molecules out of position and causes
them to clump together. Eventually, after prolonged stirring, the fat
molecules clump so much that they separate from the liquid
(14:16):
in the cream and a solid mass forms. The liquid
is buttermilk, and of course that goes on to be
used as butter milk, and the solid mass is butter.
Behold the third and final miracle. So little research I
found this that one of the earliest recipes for butter
involved putting the milk or the cream inside an animal
(14:36):
skin and just suspending it and letting it swing back
and forth until butter formed. Uh. Today, to qualify as butter,
it has to contain at least eight butter fat with
no more than sixteen water and two percent milk solids.
And you need twenty one pounds of cow's milk to
(14:57):
make one pound of butter. So to get it to
be that consistent yellow that we're all used to, it's
actually artificially colored. And this is important it will come
back around later when we talk about margarine. The way
they do that is with something called a nato, which
is a food coloring that comes from the seeds of
I believe it's pronounced the aquiote tree. So it's not
(15:18):
as yellow as we're used to. That's a food coloring
that's added to it. Okay, so that's super yellow butter.
So you know, at this point, like you said, we
could go into greater detail about the chemistry of of
what's going on here, but but hopefully this will give
you just a fresh uh and new idea of what's
going on Again. I love that idea that solar energy
(15:39):
has become fatty, delicious butter has become this ultimately the
super food, this this premiere of food stuff that and
you'll you'll realize why it becomes so valuable to the
humans who obsess about it. Well, and I know some
of you out there are wondering this because I was
when I was doing the research. So, if butter comes
from milk, is there human butter? And what does that
(16:01):
taste like? The answer is yes, I don't know what
it tastes like, but yes there is human butter. In fact,
just two years ago, a woman experimented with her own
breast milk and shared photos on Reddit of the butter
that she created, and it caused a little bit of
a stir. The week that she did this, there were
people were freaking out, either saying, oh my god, this
(16:22):
is so cool or oh my god, that's so disgusting.
But yeah, you know, same process works with human milk. Now,
in her defense, there are people who seem to freak
out when they realize that human breast milk exists. Oh yeah, yeah,
absolutely my people. I mean, of course, men, I got
and that was a segment of the male population who
(16:42):
seems to want to remain in complete denial. There definitely
seemed to be like some people that were like, that
is the most disgusting thing ever, I don't want to
have anything to do with it. And then the other
side was, oh, my god, I want to try that.
That's kind of that's kind of the divide and most reddit. Yeah,
reddit known for its diversity in opinions. Yeah, alright, we're
gonna take our first break and when we come back,
(17:04):
we're getting going to get into this idea of holy butter.
We're gonna run through various examples from different cultures throughout history, Uh,
the way that they've obsessed about this substance. Alright, we're back.
So the word butter actually comes from the ancient Greek
(17:25):
combination of boo and turan, which means couches. Makes sense. Uh, Now,
we're going to go through a couple of different uses
religious experience uses of butter throughout many cultures around the world.
First one we talked about here was Tibetan butter, and
(17:45):
I couldn't find a lot on this, so I'd love
to know if anybody else out there has heard about it.
But apparently, uh, it's used in the embalming of bodies,
or at least it was used in the embalming of
bodies on the those of deceased Lamas and they basically
would simmer their corpses in boiling butter. And these are
(18:06):
Tibetan Buddhist holy men. Yeah, not actual lamas of anyone
out there, just to be clear, right, Yeah, although that
would be a great lama recipe probably, yeah. Uh. On this,
On the this subject of funeral butter usage, I did
run across the fact that in ancient Egypt. Of course,
(18:27):
ancient Egyptians were known for their elaborate rights of embalming.
We've discussed this a bit on the show and a
couple of episodes at least. And they used various things.
I mean, they seem to have used pretty much everything
in this practice. Anything you get their hands on. It
could be used to preserve the corpse and give it
a lifelike appearance. Uh. And they would use butter, along
(18:50):
with soldust and sand, as a way to plump up
desiccated flesh, either by stuffing it into the mouth or
through incisions in the skin. For some reason, that may
a lot of sense to me, only in the sense
of that, like, I know, a lot of plastic surgery
now involves injecting animal fat into skin. So like, if
you're going to try to form flesh somehow, whether it's
(19:12):
dead or alive, that seems like a natural place to go. Right, Yeah,
I mean, especially for the ancient Egyptians, who I believe
we've mentioned on the show before. We're we're we have
some of the earliest examples of what is essentially plastic surgery. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So then what about Buddha butter? This sounds like somebody's
got a patent that if they haven't already, I'm sure
(19:34):
there's probably some company out there already a picture of
the smiling Buddha with a stick of butter in his hands. Uh. Well,
years ago, there were butter sculptures called tomas, which were
made to celebrate Shakya mooney Buddha's victories. Now today there's
actually still an annual butter festival that's celebrated in March
(19:55):
as part of the Mono Lam Festival, I believe that's
how you say it. And at this festival, thousands of
butter lamps are lit, and these signify the wisdom and
light of the Buddha. These are made from clarified yak
butter and they line the streets. Now, donating such butter
to the monasteries is actually believed to bring good karma
because these they allows the monks to craft the lamps
(20:18):
for this holiday. So there's another one. Yeah, this one
is fascinating. Uh. In that KOs Rova book that I mentioned,
butter a rich history. She goes into it at at
in depth, and I'm not going to attempt to to
share everything here. If you want to read more about it,
you should definitely pick that book up. But she she
says that the we have this modern tradition of creating
(20:42):
these thomas, and uh, these the modern tradition dates back
probably go around, but I think this those refer specifically
to the version that's fives today and not that that
earlier tradition that you alluded to. So turma as you
mentioned to additionally yak butter, but they'll also mix in
(21:03):
roasted barley flour or sampa uh and then sometimes wax
as i'll describe here. So traditionally this is crazy that
the monk would use only yak butter with the sampa,
and they would form a range of shapes and designs
for tantric rituals and offerings, and the monks would have
to cool their fingers uh, and to sculpt the butter clay,
(21:25):
they continually dip their fingers or the clay itself into
a bowl of cold water or the snow. And often
they would be working in like a really cold room,
so it would be super tough. Where this is not
just a thing where someone would grab some butter and
you know, a small bowl of cold water and then oops,
have got to work around with a little bit and look,
I made a sculpture. Now they would spend months on this,
(21:47):
and the artist would often suffer illness, frost bite, arthritis
and uh. And then at the end of all this,
the sculpture is just going to melt away in the spring.
So it's this this perfect symbol of of impermanence, much
like the Tibetan practice of crafting mandalas out of multi
colored sand. Wow. Well, all right, so it's easy to
(22:08):
do this in Tibet because it's cold there. What happens
if you I'm gonna jump ahead in the notes here,
what happens if you want to sculpt butter here in America?
Because it's a thing, it's not wholly necessarily but the
butter cow. I mean, has anybody out there seen a
butter cow before? I'm talking about a life sized butter
(22:29):
sculpture of a cow. Uh. It might strike close to
home for some of our listeners. You might have I
first heard about the butter cow on The West Wing
when the character C. J. Craig does this whole celebration
talking about how great the butter cow is. But it
was actually first sculpted in nineteen eleven by J. K.
Daniels at the Iowa State Fair. And you basically start
(22:52):
with wood, metal wire, and steel mesh to frame the
six pounds slab of low moisture, pure cream Iowa butter.
That's what at least that's what the Iowa State Fair says. Um.
They put that in a forty degree cooler and apply
more layers of butter until you've made a life sized cow.
Now some of you out there going, whoa, that's a
(23:14):
lot of butter that's wasted. Well, unlike the Tibetan practice
that we were just talking about earlier, this butter is
supposedly recycled and reused for up to ten years after. Yeah,
but it's interesting like present day, we can put them
inside a big cooler, but in Tibet they had to
go outside with cold water and they're getting sick. But
(23:36):
they're like still doing the same kind of you know,
aesthetic practice. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's it's interesting
too to note that eventually you have Tibetan monks that
are engaging in this practice moving down into warmer portions
of India. So how do you do this if you're
if if it's a you know, a warmer climate, right,
(23:57):
Monks now residing in India are often forced to use
or margarine mixed with paraffint wax. So that's where the
wax comes in, okay, and that probably helps keep it
all together. Yeah. Now, another Um Eastern tradition, I ran across,
comes from Chinese Buddhism. According to Chinese Buddhist master Tie
and Tae, the successive states of soul transformations in reincarnation
(24:21):
basically line up with the stages in the transformation from
from milk to gee. And I think that fits in
rather nicely with what we read in the opening. You know,
this idea that in the same way that that a
soul may go from life to life to life, and
it's kind of this refining process ideally as you work
towards a complete removal from the wheel of death and rebirth.
(24:42):
Also we're seeing this, you know, the sunlight, the grass,
everything moving towards butter as the guess the human achievement. Yeah, uh, well,
it's interesting because you know when you read up on
butter and people talk about like the ancient practices involving it,
most always they bring up the Bible because it's like
one of our most read modern texts that references but
(25:06):
are quite a bit. Yeah, there's there's one part in
particular that's uh, that's that's worth pointing out, you know,
not just for the Bible also, I mean basically Abrahamic
tradition as as a whole, because it conserves Abraham. He's
a preparing food for three angels of the Lord who
are visiting in Genesis eighteen. And if you think back
to our our John d episode, we're talking angels of
(25:27):
the Lord here. These are these are terrifying, beautiful beings.
They've taken human form, sure, but these are these are
the guys that the way, you know, lay waste to cities. Yeah,
what else are you gonna give them? Would welcome them
with the butter? Yeah, they said, hey, Sarah, help me
fetch the bread and butter. We've got three angels of
the Lord coming. And it worked out. They apparently thought
(25:49):
the butter was delightful, good, it's probably carried gold. They're
not paying you gotta pull out the best stuff and
the angels of the Lord. Well, that leads me to
a totally opposite, unrelated to the Bible butter cultural phenomenon,
and that is the Yule Lads of Iceland. Now, Joe,
(26:12):
our co host, insisted that we had to bring this up.
You recommended it to us. We've talked about the Yule
Lads before. I think it was maybe last year's Christmas
episode we were talking about them. But if you don't
recall that the basic gist is in Icelandic lore, uh
instead of or maybe it's along with Santa Claus. I'm
not quite sure. There's thirteen children who visit Iceland's Kids
(26:36):
during the thirteen nights prior to Christmas, one each night,
and they have these amazing names. There's all kinds of
of Ule Lads like Sausage sniffer and door liquor, but
there is one that is specifically related to Butter, and
his name is Butter Greedy. At least that's what it
translates as. Uh. So, the gist is that you're supposed
(26:58):
to put a shoe out on your window sill and
if you're good, each day, a fule lad will leave
you candy in the shoe, but if you're bad, they
fill it up with rotting to potatoes, rotting potatoes. And
so I'm wondering about butter greedy, like presumably he eats
all your butter if you're bad, and he also puts
(27:18):
rotting potatoes inside your shoe. But it immediately popped to
Joe's mind when we said, hey, we're doing this episode
on butter, and he was like, there's gotta be a
ule lad And he was right, there was, Yeah, because
in a bit we're gonna talk about some other um
superstitions and folk beliefs that line up with this idea
of protecting that butter from you know, real world thiefs,
(27:39):
but also supernatural threats because this is this, this is
a super food stuff and especially in you know, in
the winter, you're gonna need this to survive, right, I mean,
think about how much work goes into making it, especially
like when you're when you're not talking about an industrialized process, right,
like you're making it by hand, Like you're gonna really
(28:00):
covet and and uh conserve this stuff. Yeah, indeed, I
mean survival um, real quick before we move on, I
want to point out that Lord Krishna in Hinduism, there's
a you know, a noble, important figure in so many
of the epics, but it's uh, there's also this tradition
of young Krishna kind of like baby Krishna. You may
(28:22):
have a number of you may have seen pictures because
he's depicted is basically this blue baby. I kind of
remember this. And he's a trickster and he's always getting
into mischief and one of the things he would do
is steel butter. Oh okay, well that's quasi related to
the next instance of butter, which a lot of you
are probably familiar with, and that's g uh. My wife
uses ge all the time and cooking essentially in Hindu sacrifices.
(28:45):
Though during the Vedic period, g it was created because
it's a kind of clarified butter that's made with various
grains and vegetables, and back then it was thought to
satisfy the hunger of the gods who would ensure order,
that make sure order was maintained on earth. And there
was a ritual called Jottak Carmon that was performed at
(29:05):
the birth of a boy and involved presenting the baby
with ge, honey and gold. Alright, so some of you
out there probably wondering, well, clarified butter I like that.
What's the difference between that and ge or what's traditionally
called it was leaky. Well, they've both been made by
melting butter over low heat, allowing the water content to
evaporate so that the milk solids settle to the bottom
(29:27):
of the pand then what you do is you you
skim the surface, you clear the fat. It's poured off
and the residue is discarded. But here's the difference. Clarified
butter has the fat poured off as soon as possible.
That way, it keeps the milk solids from browning. For
it was le ge, the butter is simmered until the
solids are golden browned. And this is what gives it
(29:48):
this nutty flavor. I'm sure many of you out there,
if you've if you've had Indian food, you're probably familiar
with this flavor. You might not know that it's ge,
but it's it's a it's delightful um. And the vegetable
that was mentioned earlier, that's actually made from hydrogenated vegetable
oils um and it basically resembles shortening. And then another
(30:08):
one that Joe brought to our attention, This is a
weird one. He started talking about this yesterday and I
got a little nauseous, uh, And then I did the
research on it. Bog butter. Yeah, this one originally came
up a little bit in our our research for the
episode we did about ritual regicide and this idea that
that you would have certain ancient cultures that would ritually
(30:34):
murder kings or failed kings, you know, rulers or failed rulers.
And one of the examples comes up in these these
early European cultures that would utilize the bogs. You would
find these bodies and the bogs that had been ritually
murdered because the bog was not it wasn't just a
place you dumped something you wanted to get rid of.
This isn't like the mafia taking somebody out to a
swamp and dumping them. This the bog was a sacred
(30:57):
place and it was a place where it was you know,
it's a fitting spot to deposit to the body of
a king that had been killed in a sacrifice, especially
because of its preservative qualities. It makes me think like
it's interesting, like bogs were sort of to Ireland in Scotland,
what the very arid desert was for ancient Egypt. It
(31:19):
results in mummification, which is why we know so much
about the Bog people and in this case, bog butter.
So you're probably going, wait, what is bog butter? What
does that have to do with dead kings buried in bogs? Well,
four hundred thirty samples of bog butter have been excavated
from Pete bogs in Ireland and Scotland and they date
back as early as four hundred BC. Basically, it's buried
(31:43):
several feet deep in these bogs in huge quantities. Uh.
And I first thing that popped in my mind was
is this just like raw butter? Or is it in something?
And we turned to an academic article about it and
it's it turns out it's Uh, it's either just a
lump of butter, like a big lump of butter, or
(32:06):
it's in a container that's usually made of wood, or
it might be wrapped in animal bladders. And you're probably going,
why are these people? Okay, I get why they're preserving
their dead kings but why are they dropping butter in
the bog. Well, it's probably because the bogs have a
well documented ability to preserve that. And butter was really valuable.
I mean it was so valuable that it was used
(32:28):
to pay rent and taxes, and in some areas it
was actually used to help waterproof fabric, and it was
used in everything from building materials to candles. So burying
it in a bog while you could have been doing
that to preserve it, or or maybe it was a
way to change its flavor. And I wrote next to
this in the notes because I'm thinking, like, what does
(32:49):
bog butter taste like? It's so it seems like nobody's
really eating bog butter. I mean maybe they have, but
I don't think it's like the ideas, like you dig
it up thousands of years later and it's so much better,
you know, Like, it's not like that. But the butter.
Here's the other thing. It was also thought to cure illness.
So some people placed it next to a person who
is ill at the time, and they thought it might
(33:12):
absorb their disease. But what happens if the victim dies, Well,
then you take that butter and you bury it in
the ball. Okay, so maybe you really shouldn't eat that
butter then, because it's filled with butter. Yeah, exactly, man,
that should be like a that should have been like
a full Moon Entertainment directed DVD movie like Attack of
the Bog. Better, if there's still time, there's still I
(33:34):
can see it like moving and crawling around, maybe even
animating a butter cow. Oh oh yeah, that's the culminating
scene as a butter cow comes to life and chases
somebody into the bog. All right, let's see what else
we have here real quick in passing that, if we
did find an African example in remote regions of Ethiopia,
(33:57):
there's still some cultural use where of butter, where the
bride to be is lacquered with butter and red clay,
kind of you know, a preparation for marriage. But one
of the more fascinating examples that we came across, and
this ties back into this idea of butter theft. Are
these just various traditions and beliefs that are where one
(34:21):
would protect the butter or attempt to steal butter through magic.
So in Norwegian, uh, it's something called the small cat
or the butter cat and uh it's a bajara, I
believe in Swedish and a tilberry or snucker in Icelandic.
(34:41):
It was a creature of spun yarn that you know,
I'm sorcerer would make and uh it sucked milk from
other people's cows and returned it to its master. Butter
homunculi made of yarn. That's pretty cool. That's crazy. And
there's like a whole tradition of various like thread based uh,
weaving based magic. Very very curious because when you think
(35:05):
about the creation, the creation aspect of all of this,
like we're talking about using one like a magical use
of one technology to tap into another technology, right. Yeah.
So I've also read and of course you know traditions
are going to vary, but I've I've read some accounts
that the til barry was created from a human rib
dug up from a graveyard and brought to life when
(35:28):
the commune when communion wine is spit on it three
sundays in a row. This is again, this has to
be in our butter horror movie. So you take a
human rib, you spit on it for three weeks, and
then you presumably you've ad yarn, and then you've got
your butter homunculous cat being that goes and steals butter
(35:49):
yea or milk, at least milk, but the but the
butter is still very much at risk. And so you
have all these magical protections that are utilized to protect
the butter, including the magical butter not And this was
a symbol that was used to magically protect a butter
in Icelandic traditions. And uh, I had an image of
it that it kind of looks like what a pentacle,
(36:11):
except one that is kind of skewed so that the
base is is broader and wider than the top, so
it looks like, you know, a kid misdrew a pentagon
or something. So this is a symbol that's drawn near
the butter to protect it, or is it is it
drawn in butter um? I think both understanding is that
(36:33):
had kind of varied. You would just the symbol had
to be associated with the butter. But I did see
some other examples of various things you would do to
the butter to safeguard it, including one right that involved
driving a rusty nail from a coffin into the side
of your butter. That would protect it from going bad
or being stolen. Interesting, all right, Yeah, I'm just collecting
(36:56):
more ideas for my butter movie now. Yeah, and and
I if anyone out there really wants to make a
go at the butter horror movie again, check out that
book by A. Lane Kosa Rova, Butter at a Rich History.
It's in print right now, it's in digital form. I
can't recommend it strongly enough, best butter book you'll ever read.
On that note, let's take a quick break, our final break,
(37:16):
and then when we come back we will discuss butter
and war. All right, we've returned. So we started off
by talking about that doctor Seus's story about the butter War,
and it sounded vaguely ridiculous, right, that these two cultures
(37:37):
would fight each other over which side of the bread
they would put their butter on. Yeah, it was the
UK versus Zooks. And his one propaganda poster in the
book reminds us, yuks are not zooks, keep your butter
side up. And it sounds crazy, but we came pretty
close to something similar here in the US. Maybe not
a war necessarily, but there was some hysteria for sure
(38:01):
surrounding butter. Uh. And it all started in France. In
eighteen sixty nine, Emperor Louis Napoleon the Third offered a
prize to whoever could make a low priced version of
butter for the lower classes and for the military, So
it was butter butter for war. The winner people, Oh yeah, exactly.
(38:23):
The winner was French chemist I'm going to get this
name wrong, Hippolyte Maje Moray uh. And he invented margarine,
which we all know and used today. Yeah, it's pretty
interesting how he figured it out because he basically made
that connection that we we pointed out earlier that a
lot of the fat is coming from the animal itself, right,
so he said, why not process it from the animal itself? Yeah,
(38:45):
it's made from well, at least his version was made
from beef tallow um. And he sold this patent to
the Jurgen's Butter making company and they eventually became part
of Unilever, and Uni Lever is still one of the
world's leading producers of margarine. So when it arrived here
in the US in the eighteen seventies, there was a
(39:06):
political economic battle between manufacturers of margarine and manufacturers of butter,
and it led to In eight six, the federal government
had to pass the Margarine Act, which put a restrictive
tax on margarine and demanded that its manufacturers pay a
prohibitive licensing fee. This is a quote from the article
(39:30):
that I read about it in National Geographic. It said
pro butter political cartoonists pictured factories dropping everything from stray
cats to soap paint, arsenic and rubber boots into the
margarine mix, and a barrage of dubious scientific reports hinted
that margarine caused cancer or possibly lead to insanity. What's
(39:51):
that remind us of that we just talked about also
from this same period of time, Green tea. Yeah, he
but we're saying that it made you crazy, it made
you hallucinate, or it was ultimately because the manufacturers were
putting illicit substances in it, like iron filings. But in
this sense, the cartoonists, I think this was propaganda. I
(40:14):
don't think necessarily that this margarine had a stray cat
dropped into it. But why did this happen? Well, Okay
State politicians began fighting over the color of margarine. They
were saying that coloring yellow was false advertising because margarine
is naturally white. It's made from tallow and that's after
(40:34):
it's processing. But thirty two states here in the US
passed laws to demand that margarine be dyed pink instead
of yellow, and the Supreme Court actually had to intervene
and they overturned the laws because they said, look, it's
illegal to enforce the adulteration of food. Yeah, that's it
(40:55):
sounds like some straight up Dr SEUs nonsense right there,
The idea that someone would say, actually, you're to sell
that margarine, you gotta die at pink. Yeah, it's just
straight up right out of the doctor's But clearly must
have inspired this story. They must have known about it.
But yeah, it's just crazy to me. You know. I
think about like all the insanity that's going on in
(41:16):
our government right now and the back and forth like
haggling and kind of just nasty rhetoric, and it feels like, oh,
this is just a product of today, and then you
look back a hundred hundred and fifty years ago and
you're like, oh no, Like it was just as silly
people were yelling at each other about making margarine pink. Yeah,
yeah you can, because I can imagine the way like
modern headlines and social media would pick up on it like, oh,
(41:39):
this legislator just introduced a bill to die all of
our marjarine pink, what's going on exactly? So all right,
you think this story is over, it's not. By the
time we get to World War two, the United States
needs margarine because the depression in the war have led
to butters shortages. Like we said, bondared, it's a valued commodity.
(41:59):
So argarine became more palatable to Americans because it was
made with hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of animal fats like
the one we were just talking about with the gee. Yeah,
so that's interesting. But during the war, margarine was even
sold with capsules of yellow food coloring to get past
(42:19):
all the fury about dying. So it came white, but
then you would add the yellow so when you put
it out on your table, it looked like butter. Except
in Wisconsin. Wisconsin wasn't having any of this because using
yellow margarine in Wisconsin was a crime that was punishable
by fines or imprisonment. Oh goodness. So you look at
(42:43):
the Yuks and the Zooks and you think, well, that
couldn't happen. Well, we got pretty close. We we were
at least imprisoning people and finding them in one state
in the United States for how they used butter and
or Margarine. Well, you know, to bring it all back
around to the Yuks and the Zooks and the Butter
(43:03):
Battle Book. Uh and and as I was getting ready
with my notes for this episode, I ended up going
to the library checking out a copy of this book
because we have a number of sus books in the house,
but we don't have the Butter Battle Book. So I thought, all,
I need to read this to my son. He loves
Dr sus I love Dr Susy. Did you like it?
He liked it? He had he had questions about it,
(43:24):
questions that I could only vaguely answer because the spoiler.
But the book ends with a standoff as this arms
race over how how best to spread your butter has
led to essentially the development of these little pill sized
nuclear weapons, and the Yuks and the Zooks are to
standoff who's going to drop theirs first? And and other
(43:47):
other Yuks and Zooks are going into bomb shelters, and
it's it confronts mutually assured destruction, the idea that have
nuclear weapons are ever deployed. Uh. In a in a
large scale manner, you just gonna be complete destruction on
both sides, not to mention environmental um destruction as well.
So I haven't read the book, but I watched the
(44:09):
cartoon version this morning, and if it's similar, what really
impressed me was that it's a story that doesn't hold
your hand or a child's hand by saying like, this
is what you're supposed to learn from this, because both
sides are hysterical in their rhetoric against one another and
how they use butter, and they basically are amping up
(44:29):
their their technology in the like kind of silly Dr
Seuss like weaponry way right there, like weird sling shots
and the things that catch sling shots and throw them back.
But like it's it's interesting in the cartoon because it's
like a father telling his son like, this is why
we hate them, this is why you have to destroy them,
and here's my personal story as to why. And usually
(44:52):
in a children's cartoon or a story like that, you go, oh, well,
that's the authoritative figure. I will listen to him, and
I will learn a lesson from him. But the lesson
to be earned is like these people are all crazy
and they're they're gonna end up killing each other. Yeah,
Like you read seuses the Lorax and they have that
wonderful environmental message at the end. It's also kind of
darth that says, look, the things are bad and it's
(45:13):
up to you to to change it and make it better.
And here's something you can do, Like it's all symbolized
in the planning of the seed. You can plant more trees,
you can care about the environment, and we might be
able to reclaim some of what's lost. But at the
end of the butter Battle Book, there's no suggestion. It
just shows you, like how crazy the world has gotten
and what kind of state we're in. And SEUs doesn't
(45:35):
have an answer, so totally I bastion being like, um so,
who was right the yooks or the zooks or what
am I supposed to do? It raises a lot of
a lot of questions, uh, And it's I was tempted
to say what It raises more questions now And it's
more of a potent story now because we have this
renewed discussion of a potential nuclear arms race and and
(46:00):
and nuclear tensions once more. But this is but it's
never This is a story that's never become unimportant, like right,
I don't think it'll ever be passe, right, Like you
and I will be deadened in the ground two hundred
years from now. The butter Battle Book in the bottom.
Maybe yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah, yeah, it's still it's
still a wonderful book, but also a terrifying book for adults,
(46:23):
because the threat of nuclear war is terrifying and the
threat hasn't gone away. And so in continuing this this
effort to to highlight nonprofits organizations that depend on donations
on our our episodes, I wanted to do a call
out to the Arms Control Association. Okay, you can find
them at arms control dot org. They were founded in
(46:45):
nineteen one. They're in national, nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to
promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies,
so that they have public education and media programs. It
has a magazin seen arms Control Today. They provide policymakers,
the press, and just the interested public with authoritative information, analysis,
(47:08):
and commentary on arms control proposal proposals, negotiation negotiations and agreements,
and related national security issues. So maybe that's what you
do if you've got a kid who reads the Butter
battle Book and says, I don't know what I'm supposed
to do. I suspect the Arms Control Association probably has
some media materials that, at least for us as adults,
(47:28):
helps us to sort of better think about arms races
and mutually assured destruction. Indeed, so there we go from
from butter to mutually assured destruction. That's what we bring
you here. I Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
And hey, also, I want to know some answers because
we couldn't find them here. If you know what human
(47:48):
butter tastes like, I want to know if you know
what bog butter tastes like. I want to know what's
the weirdest butter that you've had, like from from an animal. Uh,
there's all kinds of places to tell us. You can
on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.
You can write us at blow the Mind on all
of those platforms, or you can go visit stuff to
(48:09):
Blow your Mind dot com if you want to learn
more about mutually assured destruction or butter. Well, that's where
we've got all of our podcasts, We've got all of
our videos, every blog post that we've ever written. Check
it out. Yeah, and as always, you can reach out
to us you want to. You want more episodes they
focus on food products you wan't want on cheese, Let
us know you want some more episodes that focus on
(48:31):
the threat of nuclear annihilation. Let us know we can
do that as well. We walk both sides of the
street here at stuff to blow your mind. Send us
an email, let us know at blow the mind at
how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and
(48:53):
thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com.
The tame big I think them four stout far far
(49:15):
f
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