January 10, 2017 • 48 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from housetop Works
Dot Carlo. This is the secret name of butter, tongue
of the gods navel of immortality. We will proclaim the
(00:23):
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
(00:47):
stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb
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 on the fifteen hundred BCE. So
we're going to really dive into butter. The episode I
(01:08):
wanted to do like an episode title called Holy Butter Batman.
That 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
(01:31):
a satirical uh 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 War, uh, the nuclear arms
(01:51):
race and mutually assured destruction. It is the only children's
book that I've run across that ends with the contemplation
of mutually shured nuclear destruction. Yeah, I uh, you know,
I was not familiar with this specific Dr SEUs book
until today. And uh, I watched the Ralph Facts she
animated version on YouTube this morning and inporation for this,
(02:14):
and it blew my mind. It was like, I I
wonder how it would have 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 it'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
(02:36):
story because to to a kid, it's just a goofy tale.
Involving these bird like people. 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
(02:59):
with real human being. 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
(03:20):
if you you buy really good butter, or you you
get involved in a m you know, a love affair
with with with coffee with butter in it, with bulletproof
coffee all that, But for the most part, you know,
it's just is 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
(03:41):
you know, restaurant foods to make it delightful. But we
don't think about the wonder of butter. We don't think
about the alchemy of butter and the miracle of 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,
(04:02):
it's certainly tastes great. And I don't think I've ever
met 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
(04:25):
you mentioned like the taste of it and like it
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
(04:46):
kind of expensive butter, and it I like reserve it
for special things like I don't just cook with carry
gold butter, you know, like like that's that's special. Yeah,
we got into that better a lama 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
(05:07):
that kind of went away, didn't it. Like the bulletproof
coffee thing. 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
(05:28):
put butter in my coffee, and it tastes grape probably,
but it's probably I would 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 been keeping with what we're going
to talk about the day. But ultimately The main benefit
(05:49):
of buttered coffee that I found was that it was
very filling for someone who normally just has coffee and
smoothie for breakfast. So I was sustained all the way
through lunch and maybe even pass 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
(06:09):
a lot of the time I don't snack in the
mornings anyway. Oh interesting, okay, and you're back to just
like coffee 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
(06:29):
kick off by talk getting in a way. We're gonna
get this out of the way, because I know the
one thing that that most of you are not excited
about is to 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 transferred. It's you transformed.
(06:50):
It's a milk into a solid substance. It's spread herble.
Think of it as a series of three miracles by
which one turns the light of the sun into a
pad of butter. Again, holy butter. Alright, So first, let's
just give at least passing credit to the alchemy of photosynthesis.
(07:10):
The grass in the field converts energy in the form
of sunlight into chemical energy in the form of sugars
or other carbohydrates. So that's the first miracle. Second, a
female ruminant being a cow, a sheep, a camel, a
water buffalo, a goat, et cetera, they consume the grass
and and truly, as Elaine cost of A points out
(07:31):
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 the animal might be, as
a mobile um harvester and processing unit, as opposed to
just an animal that's eating. Because these ruminants are are
built to transform grass into milk. That consider the fact
(07:52):
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 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 of ruminating,
(08:12):
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 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
(08:34):
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 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
(08:56):
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. 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? Yeah, Yeah,
it's like it was almost like there was a um
(09:19):
a porthole built into its side and you could look
inside and it's not like you're 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,
(09:40):
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, oh maybe that was it.
It was just for us to be able to see
inside the living cow. Yeah, maybe it was. This requires
more more. We need to come back to this. Maybe
maybe someone out there can can fill us in. Okay,
(10:02):
So we have this this wonderful fermentation process going on,
and only half of the fat is coming from the
cow's diet. The rest is coming from the cow's own
body fat. All right, So there's your second miracle. Ruminant milk,
a fatty liquid that's that's sole purpose is to ensure
the survival of the animals young or you know, you know,
(10:23):
for a bunch of eight creatures to steal, drink, and
then process into various butters and cheeses. It's also worth
noting that the exact composition of this milk is 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,
(10:45):
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. What's like
the weirdest type of butter you've ever had? Because I can't.
I don't think I've really fermented 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.
(11:07):
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, And if you've had
actual buffalo mozzarella, then you've had cheese made from the
water buffalo. Yeah, again, the fat content. That's why that
is the premier. I love some buffalo mozzarella. My other
(11:28):
favorite cheese is um from a very specific part of
the world, Zacapana, Poland. They yeah, it's I believe it's
a goat cheese, but again it's just phenomenal 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
(11:49):
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 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
(12:09):
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 stir them up. That's what
the agitation is until they clump together to form wondrous butter. Yeah,
the the cow or the sheep or the camel, they've
(12:30):
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 and stuff, and then we're going to process it.
It seems really wasteful, but then you realize that there's
there's a place for all the various leftovers as well. Yeah,
because what happens next is you agitate or stir up
(12:54):
the cream. This shakes the fat molecules out of position
and cause them to clump together. Eventually, after long stirring,
the fat molecules clump so much that they separate from
the liquid in the cream, and a solid mass forms.
The liquid is butter milk, 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
(13:18):
little research I found this that one of the earliest
recipes for butter involved putting the milk or the cream
inside an animal 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 sixtent water and
(13:41):
two percent milk solids. And you need twenty one pounds
of cow's milk to 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
(14:02):
from the seeds of I believe it's pronounced the aquiote tree.
So it's not as yellow as we're used to. That's
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
(14:25):
what's going on Again. I love that idea that solar
energy 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
(14:47):
comes from milk, is there human butter? And what does
that 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,
(15:08):
there were people were freaking out, either saying, oh my god,
this 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 by people. I mean, of course men. I got
the impression, and that was a certain segment of the
(15:30):
male population who 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, all right,
(15:51):
we're gonna take our first break and when we come back,
we're getting going to get into this idea of holy butter.
We're gonna run through a various examples from different cultures
throughout history. Uh, the way that they've obsessed about this substance.
All right, we're back. So the word butter actually comes
(16:13):
from the ancient Greek 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 I couldn't find
(16:36):
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 llamas and they basically would simmer their
corpses in boiling butter. And these are Tibetan Buddhist holy men, yeah,
(16:58):
not actual lamas if anyone else, Yeah, 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, ancient Egyptians were known for their elaborate rights
(17:21):
of embalming. We 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 can 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 with soldust and sand as a way
(17:41):
to plump up desiccated flesh, either by stuffing it into
the mouth or through incisions in the skin. For some reason,
that makes 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 force warm flesh somehow,
whether it's dead or alive. That seems like a natural
(18:03):
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 it's essentially plastic surgery. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So then
what about Buddha butter? That sounds like somebody's got a
patent that, if they haven't already, I'm sure there's probably
(18:24):
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 Mooni Buddha's victories. Now today there's
actually still an annual butter festival that's celebrated in March
(18:45):
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 this reads. Now, donating such butter
to the monasteries is actually believed to bring good karma
because these they allows the monks to craft the lamps
(19:08):
for this holiday. So there's another one. Yeah, this one
is fascinating. Uh. In that Kosa Rova book that I mentioned,
butter a rich history, she goes into it at 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
(19:31):
of creating these thomas and uh, these the modern tradition
dates back probably 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, traditionally yak butter, but they'll also mix in
(19:52):
roasted barley flower 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
(20:14):
clay 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,
(20:34):
I made a sculpture. Now. They would spend months on this,
and the the artists 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 mandala's out of multi
colored sand. Wow, well, all right, so it's easy to
(20:57):
do this in Tibet because it's cold. Are 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
(21:18):
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
(21:41):
with wood, metal, wire, and steel mesh to frame the
six hundred pounds slab of low moisture, pure cream Iowa butter.
That's at least that's what the Iowa State Fair sets um.
They put that in a forty degree cooler and apply
more layers of butter until you've made a life as cow. Now,
some of you out there going, WHOA, that's a lot
(22:04):
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
(22:25):
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,
(22:46):
Monks now residing in India are often forced to use
ge or margarine mixed with paraffin wax. So that's where
the wax comes to Scotcha, okay, and that probably helps
keep it all together. Yeah. Now, another Eastern tradition I
across comes from Chinese Buddhism. According to Chinese Buddhist master
Tie and Tae, the successive states of soul transformations in
(23:09):
reincarnation 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
(23:30):
and rebirth. Also, we're seeing this, uh you know, the sunlight,
the grass, everything moving towards butter as 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,
almost always they bring up the Bible because it's like
(23:52):
one of our most read modern texts that references butter
quite a bit. Yeah, there's there's one part in particular
that's that's that's worth pointing out, you know, not just
for the Bible alto 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
(24:12):
in Genesis eighteen. And if you think back to our
our John d episode, we're talking angels with 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 which would welcome them with the butter? Yeah?
They said, hey, Sarah, help me fetch the bread and butter.
(24:35):
We've got three Angels of the Lord coming and it
worked out. They apparently thought the butter was delightful. It's
probably carried goldy. You gotta pull out the best stuff
in the Angel of the Lord. Well, that leads me
to a totally opposite, unrelated to the Bible butter cultural phenomenon,
(24:57):
and that is the Yule Lads Iceland. Now Joe, our
co host, insisted that we had to bring this up.
You recommended it to us. We've talked about the ul
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
(25:18):
instead of or maybe it's along with Santa Claus. I'm
not quite sure. There's thirteen children who visit Iceland's Kids
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
(25:41):
his name is Butter Greedy. At least that's what it
translates as. Uh. So, the gist is that you're supposed
to put a shoe out on your window sill, and
if you're good, each day a eule 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
(26:04):
all your butter if you're bad, and he also puts
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
you ole 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,
(26:29):
but also supernatural threats because this is this, this is
a super food stuff, and especially in 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
(26:49):
you're gonna really cove it 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
(27:11):
may have a number of you may have seen pictures
because he's depicted is basically this blue baby. Yeah, 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 ge. Uh
my wife uses ge all the time and cooking essentially
(27:34):
in Hindu sacrifices. 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 Joddak Harmon that was
(27:54):
performed at 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 gee 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
(28:16):
the bottom 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
(28:38):
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
g that was mentioned earlier that's actually made from hydrogenated
vegetable oils um and it basically resembles shortening. And then
(28:58):
another 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. 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
(29:24):
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 up to a
swamp and dumping them. This the bog was a sacred
(29:47):
place and it was a place where it was you know,
it's a fitting spot to deposit the body of a
king that had been killed in a sacrifice. Especially because
of its preservative qualities, it makes me like it's interesting,
like bogs, we're sort of to Ireland in Scotland what
the very arid desert was for ancient Egypt. It results
(30:09):
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
(30:33):
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 both. Uh. It's either just
a lump of butter, like a big lump of butter,
(30:55):
or 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
(31:17):
it was used 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,
(31:38):
what does 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
(32:01):
thought it might absorb their disease. But what happens if
the victim dies, well, then you take that butter and
you bury it in the bo Okay, so maybe you
really shouldn't eat that butter then because it's filled with butter. Yeah, exactly.
Oh man, that should be like a that should have
been like a full Moon entertainment directed EVD movie, like
Attack of the Bob. Butterre still time, there's still I
(32:23):
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,
(32:46):
there's still some cultural use where of butter, where the
bride to be is lacquered with butter and red clay. Okay,
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
(33:10):
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 snuck er in Icelandic.
(33:31):
It was a creature of spun yarn that you know,
sorcerer would make. And uh it sucked milk from other
people's cows and returned it to its master, butter homunculi
native yarn. That's pretty cool, that's crazy. And there's like
a whole tradition of a various like thread based weaving
based magic. Very very curious because you think about the creation,
(33:56):
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 until Barry
was created from a human rib dug up from a
graveyard and brought to life when the commune communion wine
(34:19):
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 at yarn
and then you've got your butter homunculous cat being that
goes and steals butter or milk, at least milk. But
(34:41):
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, except one that is kind of skewed
(35:03):
so that the base is is broader and wider than
the top, so it looks like, you know, a kid
misdrew a pentacon 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 because they had kind of varied you would just
(35:23):
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,
(35:45):
I'm just collecting more ideas for my butter movie now. Yeah,
and and 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, 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,
(36:06):
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 Dr Seus's story about the butter War,
and it sounded vaguely ridiculous, right, that these two cultures
(36:27):
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
(36:50):
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 four war. The winner, Oh yeah, exactly.
(37:12):
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
a 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,
(37:34):
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 Uni Lever, 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
(37:55):
a political economic battle between manufacturers of marge gerine 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
(38:19):
from the article 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.
(38:41):
What's that remind us of that we just talked about.
Also from this same period of time, Green tea. Yeah,
people were 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
a sense the cartoonists, I think this was propaganda. I
(39:04):
don't think necessarily that this margarine had a stray cats
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 talow and that's after
(39:24):
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
(39:45):
sounds like some straight up Dr SEUs nonsense right there.
The idea to someone to say, actually you're gonna sell
that margarine, you gotta diet pink. Yeah, it's just straight
up uh, right out of the Doctor SEUs. But clearly
must have inspired this story. They 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
(40:06):
in our government right now and the back and forth
like haggling and uh, 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
(40:27):
pick up on it, like, oh, this legislator just introduced
a bill to die all of our margarine 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, that's a valued commodity. So margarine became more
(40:51):
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 all the fury
about dying. So it came white, but then you would
(41:13):
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 my goodness. So you look at the Yuks and
(41:33):
the zooks and you think, well, that couldn't happen. Well,
we got pretty close. We we were at least imprisoning
people and in 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 Battle Book. Uh
(41:54):
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 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 Suits, I love Dr Susy. Did he like it?
He liked it, He had certain he had questions about it,
questions that I could only vaguely answer because the spoiler.
(42:19):
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 gonna drop theirs first? And and other other
Yuks and Zooks are going into bomb shelters, and it's
(42:40):
it confronts mutually assured destruction the idea that have nuclear
weapons are ever deployed, uh, in a in a large
scale manner, it's 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 cartoon version
this morning, and if it's similar, what really impressed me
(43:03):
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 their their
technology in the like kind of silly Dr. Seuss like
weaponry way right there, like weird sling shots and things
(43:25):
that catching 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 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
(43:47):
I will learn a lesson from him. But the lesson
to be learned is like these people are all crazy
and they're they're gonna end up killing each other. Yeah,
like you read Seuss the Lorax and they have that
wonderful environmental message at the end, it's also kind of
darth that's as look, the things are bad and it's
up to you to to change it, to make it better.
And here's something you can do, Like it's all symbolized
(44:08):
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
have an answer. I can totally bastion being like, um so,
(44:29):
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
nuclear tensions once more. But this is, but it's never
(44:54):
This is a story that's never become unimportant, like right,
I don't think it'll ever be pass a 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 the Yeah, yeah, it's still it's
still a wonderful book, but also a terrifying book for adults,
because the threat of nuclear war is terrifying and the
(45:15):
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
nineteen seventy one. They're in national, nonpartisan membership organization dedicated
(45:39):
to promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms
control policies, so that they have public education and media programs.
It has a magazine, Arms Control Today. They provide policymakers,
the press, and just the interested public with authoritative information, analysis,
and commentary on arms control proprobe proposals, negotiation, negotiations and agreements,
(46:03):
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, helps us
to sort of better think about arms races and mutually
a shared destruction. Indeed, so there we go from from
(46:26):
butter to mutually sured destruction. That's what we bring you
here us have 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 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
(46:47):
all kinds of places to tell us. You can go
on social media where on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram
you can write us at blow the mind on all
those platforms, or you can go visit stuff to blow
your mind dot com. 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,
(47:11):
and as always, you can reach out to us you
want to. You want more episodes they focus on food products.
You want want on cheese. Let us know you want
some more episodes that focus on the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Let us know we can do that as well. We
walk both sides of the street here. It's stuff to
blow your mind. Send us an email. Let us know
at Blow the Mind and how stuff works dot com.
(47:41):
Well more on this and thousands of other topics because
it how stuff works dot com. He is graduated prop
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from housetop Works
Dot Carlo. This is the secret name of butter, tongue
of the gods navel of immortality. We will proclaim the
(00:23):
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
(00:47):
stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb
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 on the fifteen hundred BCE. So
we're going to really dive into butter. The episode I
(01:08):
wanted to do like an episode title called Holy Butter Batman.
That 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
(01:31):
a satirical uh 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 War, uh, the nuclear arms
(01:51):
race and mutually assured destruction. It is the only children's
book that I've run across that ends with the contemplation
of mutually shured nuclear destruction. Yeah, I uh, you know,
I was not familiar with this specific Dr SEUs book
until today. And uh, I watched the Ralph Facts she
animated version on YouTube this morning and inporation for this,
(02:14):
and it blew my mind. It was like, I I
wonder how it would have 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 it'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
(02:36):
story because to to a kid, it's just a goofy tale.
Involving these bird like people. 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
(02:59):
with real human being. 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
(03:20):
if you you buy really good butter, or you you
get involved in a m you know, a love affair
with with with coffee with butter in it, with bulletproof
coffee all that, But for the most part, you know,
it's just is 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
(03:41):
you know, restaurant foods to make it delightful. But we
don't think about the wonder of butter. We don't think
about the alchemy of butter and the miracle of 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,
(04:02):
it's certainly tastes great. And I don't think I've ever
met 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
(04:25):
you mentioned like the taste of it and like it
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
(04:46):
kind of expensive butter, and it I like reserve it
for special things like I don't just cook with carry
gold butter, you know, like like that's that's special. Yeah,
we got into that better a lama 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
(05:07):
that kind of went away, didn't it. Like the bulletproof
coffee thing. 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
(05:28):
put butter in my coffee, and it tastes grape probably,
but it's probably I would 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 been keeping with what we're going
to talk about the day. But ultimately The main benefit
(05:49):
of buttered coffee that I found was that it was
very filling for someone who normally just has coffee and
smoothie for breakfast. So I was sustained all the way
through lunch and maybe even pass 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
(06:09):
a lot of the time I don't snack in the
mornings anyway. Oh interesting, okay, and you're back to just
like coffee 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
(06:29):
kick off by talk getting in a way. We're gonna
get this out of the way, because I know the
one thing that that most of you are not excited
about is to 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 transferred. It's you transformed.
(06:50):
It's a milk into a solid substance. It's spread herble.
Think of it as a series of three miracles by
which one turns the light of the sun into a
pad of butter. Again, holy butter. Alright, So first, let's
just give at least passing credit to the alchemy of photosynthesis.
(07:10):
The grass in the field converts energy in the form
of sunlight into chemical energy in the form of sugars
or other carbohydrates. So that's the first miracle. Second, a
female ruminant being a cow, a sheep, a camel, a
water buffalo, a goat, et cetera, they consume the grass
and and truly, as Elaine cost of A points out
(07:31):
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 the animal might be, as
a mobile um harvester and processing unit, as opposed to
just an animal that's eating. Because these ruminants are are
built to transform grass into milk. That consider the fact
(07:52):
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 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 of ruminating,
(08:12):
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 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
(08:34):
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 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
(08:56):
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. 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? Yeah, Yeah,
it's like it was almost like there was a um
(09:19):
a porthole built into its side and you could look
inside and it's not like you're 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,
(09:40):
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, oh maybe that was it.
It was just for us to be able to see
inside the living cow. Yeah, maybe it was. This requires
more more. We need to come back to this. Maybe
maybe someone out there can can fill us in. Okay,
(10:02):
So we have this this wonderful fermentation process going on,
and only half of the fat is coming from the
cow's diet. The rest is coming from the cow's own
body fat. All right, So there's your second miracle. Ruminant milk,
a fatty liquid that's that's sole purpose is to ensure
the survival of the animals young or you know, you know,
(10:23):
for a bunch of eight creatures to steal, drink, and
then process into various butters and cheeses. It's also worth
noting that the exact composition of this milk is 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,
(10:45):
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. What's like
the weirdest type of butter you've ever had? Because I can't.
I don't think I've really fermented 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.
(11:07):
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, And if you've had
actual buffalo mozzarella, then you've had cheese made from the
water buffalo. Yeah, again, the fat content. That's why that
is the premier. I love some buffalo mozzarella. My other
(11:28):
favorite cheese is um from a very specific part of
the world, Zacapana, Poland. They yeah, it's I believe it's
a goat cheese, but again it's just phenomenal 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
(11:49):
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 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
(12:09):
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 stir them up. That's what
the agitation is until they clump together to form wondrous butter. Yeah,
the the cow or the sheep or the camel, they've
(12:30):
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 and stuff, and then we're going to process it.
It seems really wasteful, but then you realize that there's
there's a place for all the various leftovers as well. Yeah,
because what happens next is you agitate or stir up
(12:54):
the cream. This shakes the fat molecules out of position
and cause them to clump together. Eventually, after long stirring,
the fat molecules clump so much that they separate from
the liquid in the cream, and a solid mass forms.
The liquid is butter milk, 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
(13:18):
little research I found this that one of the earliest
recipes for butter involved putting the milk or the cream
inside an animal 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 sixtent water and
(13:41):
two percent milk solids. And you need twenty one pounds
of cow's milk to 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
(14:02):
from the seeds of I believe it's pronounced the aquiote tree.
So it's not as yellow as we're used to. That's
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
(14:25):
what's going on Again. I love that idea that solar
energy 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
(14:47):
comes from milk, is there human butter? And what does
that 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,
(15:08):
there were people were freaking out, either saying, oh my god,
this 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 by people. I mean, of course men. I got
the impression, and that was a certain segment of the
(15:30):
male population who 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, all right,
(15:51):
we're gonna take our first break and when we come back,
we're getting going to get into this idea of holy butter.
We're gonna run through a various examples from different cultures
throughout history. Uh, the way that they've obsessed about this substance.
All right, we're back. So the word butter actually comes
(16:13):
from the ancient Greek 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 I couldn't find
(16:36):
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 llamas and they basically would simmer their
corpses in boiling butter. And these are Tibetan Buddhist holy men, yeah,
(16:58):
not actual lamas if anyone else, Yeah, 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, ancient Egyptians were known for their elaborate rights
(17:21):
of embalming. We 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 can 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 with soldust and sand as a way
(17:41):
to plump up desiccated flesh, either by stuffing it into
the mouth or through incisions in the skin. For some reason,
that makes 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 force warm flesh somehow,
whether it's dead or alive. That seems like a natural
(18:03):
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 it's essentially plastic surgery. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So then
what about Buddha butter? That sounds like somebody's got a
patent that, if they haven't already, I'm sure there's probably
(18:24):
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 Mooni Buddha's victories. Now today there's
actually still an annual butter festival that's celebrated in March
(18:45):
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 this reads. Now, donating such butter
to the monasteries is actually believed to bring good karma
because these they allows the monks to craft the lamps
(19:08):
for this holiday. So there's another one. Yeah, this one
is fascinating. Uh. In that Kosa Rova book that I mentioned,
butter a rich history, she goes into it at 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
(19:31):
of creating these thomas and uh, these the modern tradition
dates back probably 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, traditionally yak butter, but they'll also mix in
(19:52):
roasted barley flower 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
(20:14):
clay 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,
(20:34):
I made a sculpture. Now. They would spend months on this,
and the the artists 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 mandala's out of multi
colored sand. Wow, well, all right, so it's easy to
(20:57):
do this in Tibet because it's cold. Are 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
(21:18):
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
(21:41):
with wood, metal, wire, and steel mesh to frame the
six hundred pounds slab of low moisture, pure cream Iowa butter.
That's at least that's what the Iowa State Fair sets um.
They put that in a forty degree cooler and apply
more layers of butter until you've made a life as cow. Now,
some of you out there going, WHOA, that's a lot
(22:04):
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
(22:25):
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,
(22:46):
Monks now residing in India are often forced to use
ge or margarine mixed with paraffin wax. So that's where
the wax comes to Scotcha, okay, and that probably helps
keep it all together. Yeah. Now, another Eastern tradition I
across comes from Chinese Buddhism. According to Chinese Buddhist master
Tie and Tae, the successive states of soul transformations in
(23:09):
reincarnation 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
(23:30):
and rebirth. Also, we're seeing this, uh you know, the sunlight,
the grass, everything moving towards butter as 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,
almost always they bring up the Bible because it's like
(23:52):
one of our most read modern texts that references butter
quite a bit. Yeah, there's there's one part in particular
that's that's that's worth pointing out, you know, not just
for the Bible alto 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
(24:12):
in Genesis eighteen. And if you think back to our
our John d episode, we're talking angels with 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 which would welcome them with the butter? Yeah?
They said, hey, Sarah, help me fetch the bread and butter.
(24:35):
We've got three Angels of the Lord coming and it
worked out. They apparently thought the butter was delightful. It's
probably carried goldy. You gotta pull out the best stuff
in the Angel of the Lord. Well, that leads me
to a totally opposite, unrelated to the Bible butter cultural phenomenon,
(24:57):
and that is the Yule Lads Iceland. Now Joe, our
co host, insisted that we had to bring this up.
You recommended it to us. We've talked about the ul
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
(25:18):
instead of or maybe it's along with Santa Claus. I'm
not quite sure. There's thirteen children who visit Iceland's Kids
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
(25:41):
his name is Butter Greedy. At least that's what it
translates as. Uh. So, the gist is that you're supposed
to put a shoe out on your window sill, and
if you're good, each day a eule 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
(26:04):
all your butter if you're bad, and he also puts
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
you ole 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,
(26:29):
but also supernatural threats because this is this, this is
a super food stuff, and especially in 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
(26:49):
you're gonna really cove it 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
(27:11):
may have a number of you may have seen pictures
because he's depicted is basically this blue baby. Yeah, 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 ge. Uh
my wife uses ge all the time and cooking essentially
(27:34):
in Hindu sacrifices. 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 Joddak Harmon that was
(27:54):
performed at 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 gee 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
(28:16):
the bottom 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
(28:38):
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
g that was mentioned earlier that's actually made from hydrogenated
vegetable oils um and it basically resembles shortening. And then
(28:58):
another 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. 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
(29:24):
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 up to a
swamp and dumping them. This the bog was a sacred
(29:47):
place and it was a place where it was you know,
it's a fitting spot to deposit the body of a
king that had been killed in a sacrifice. Especially because
of its preservative qualities, it makes me like it's interesting,
like bogs, we're sort of to Ireland in Scotland what
the very arid desert was for ancient Egypt. It results
(30:09):
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
(30:33):
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 both. Uh. It's either just
a lump of butter, like a big lump of butter,
(30:55):
or 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
(31:17):
it was used 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,
(31:38):
what does 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
(32:01):
thought it might absorb their disease. But what happens if
the victim dies, well, then you take that butter and
you bury it in the bo Okay, so maybe you
really shouldn't eat that butter then because it's filled with butter. Yeah, exactly.
Oh man, that should be like a that should have
been like a full Moon entertainment directed EVD movie, like
Attack of the Bob. Butterre still time, there's still I
(32:23):
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,
(32:46):
there's still some cultural use where of butter, where the
bride to be is lacquered with butter and red clay. Okay,
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
(33:10):
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 snuck er in Icelandic.
(33:31):
It was a creature of spun yarn that you know,
sorcerer would make. And uh it sucked milk from other
people's cows and returned it to its master, butter homunculi
native yarn. That's pretty cool, that's crazy. And there's like
a whole tradition of a various like thread based weaving
based magic. Very very curious because you think about the creation,
(33:56):
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 until Barry
was created from a human rib dug up from a
graveyard and brought to life when the commune communion wine
(34:19):
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 at yarn
and then you've got your butter homunculous cat being that
goes and steals butter or milk, at least milk. But
(34:41):
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, except one that is kind of skewed
(35:03):
so that the base is is broader and wider than
the top, so it looks like, you know, a kid
misdrew a pentacon 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 because they had kind of varied you would just
(35:23):
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,
(35:45):
I'm just collecting more ideas for my butter movie now. Yeah,
and and 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, 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,
(36:06):
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 Dr Seus's story about the butter War,
and it sounded vaguely ridiculous, right, that these two cultures
(36:27):
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
(36:50):
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 four war. The winner, Oh yeah, exactly.
(37:12):
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
a 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,
(37:34):
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 Uni Lever, 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
(37:55):
a political economic battle between manufacturers of marge gerine 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
(38:19):
from the article 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.
(38:41):
What's that remind us of that we just talked about.
Also from this same period of time, Green tea. Yeah,
people were 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
a sense the cartoonists, I think this was propaganda. I
(39:04):
don't think necessarily that this margarine had a stray cats
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 talow and that's after
(39:24):
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
(39:45):
sounds like some straight up Dr SEUs nonsense right there.
The idea to someone to say, actually you're gonna sell
that margarine, you gotta diet pink. Yeah, it's just straight
up uh, right out of the Doctor SEUs. But clearly
must have inspired this story. They 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
(40:06):
in our government right now and the back and forth
like haggling and uh, 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
(40:27):
pick up on it, like, oh, this legislator just introduced
a bill to die all of our margarine 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, that's a valued commodity. So margarine became more
(40:51):
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 all the fury
about dying. So it came white, but then you would
(41:13):
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 my goodness. So you look at the Yuks and
(41:33):
the zooks and you think, well, that couldn't happen. Well,
we got pretty close. We we were at least imprisoning
people and in 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 Battle Book. Uh
(41:54):
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 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 Suits, I love Dr Susy. Did he like it?
He liked it, He had certain he had questions about it,
questions that I could only vaguely answer because the spoiler.
(42:19):
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 gonna drop theirs first? And and other other
Yuks and Zooks are going into bomb shelters, and it's
(42:40):
it confronts mutually assured destruction the idea that have nuclear
weapons are ever deployed, uh, in a in a large
scale manner, it's 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 cartoon version
this morning, and if it's similar, what really impressed me
(43:03):
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 their their
technology in the like kind of silly Dr. Seuss like
weaponry way right there, like weird sling shots and things
(43:25):
that catching 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 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
(43:47):
I will learn a lesson from him. But the lesson
to be learned is like these people are all crazy
and they're they're gonna end up killing each other. Yeah,
like you read Seuss the Lorax and they have that
wonderful environmental message at the end, it's also kind of
darth that's as look, the things are bad and it's
up to you to to change it, to make it better.
And here's something you can do, Like it's all symbolized
(44:08):
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
have an answer. I can totally bastion being like, um so,
(44:29):
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
nuclear tensions once more. But this is, but it's never
(44:54):
This is a story that's never become unimportant, like right,
I don't think it'll ever be pass a 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 the Yeah, yeah, it's still it's
still a wonderful book, but also a terrifying book for adults,
because the threat of nuclear war is terrifying and the
(45:15):
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
nineteen seventy one. They're in national, nonpartisan membership organization dedicated
(45:39):
to promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms
control policies, so that they have public education and media programs.
It has a magazine, Arms Control Today. They provide policymakers,
the press, and just the interested public with authoritative information, analysis,
and commentary on arms control proprobe proposals, negotiation, negotiations and agreements,
(46:03):
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, helps us
to sort of better think about arms races and mutually
a shared destruction. Indeed, so there we go from from
(46:26):
butter to mutually sured destruction. That's what we bring you
here us have 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 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
(46:47):
all kinds of places to tell us. You can go
on social media where on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram
you can write us at blow the mind on all
those platforms, or you can go visit stuff to blow
your mind dot com. 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,
(47:11):
and as always, you can reach out to us you
want to. You want more episodes they focus on food products.
You want want on cheese. Let us know you want
some more episodes that focus on the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Let us know we can do that as well. We
walk both sides of the street here. It's stuff to
blow your mind. Send us an email. Let us know
at Blow the Mind and how stuff works dot com.
(47:41):
Well more on this and thousands of other topics because
it how stuff works dot com. He is graduated prop
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