The long war for the breakfast table, from margarine raids to pandemic palm oil.

Dearest readers,

In the grand theatre of culinary scandal, one expects drama from oysters, decadence from truffles, and perhaps the odd flirtation with chocolate. But butter? Sweet, innocent, golden butter?

I regret to inform you, the dairy darling has a most sordid past. And as with all true scandals, it begins not with a bang, but with a whisper.

“Have you noticed it’s no longer soft at room temperature?”

One single tweet, uttered in 2021 by the ever-observant Canadian food writer Julie Van Rosendaal, launched a frenzy the likes of which no brunch table had seen since the invention of hollandaise.

Toast shattered. Croissants tore. Knives scraped with such resistance one might think they’d struck marble. Something was terribly wrong with the butter.

And thus unfolded what history will remember as Buttergate, a tale of betrayal, palm oil, and the most ironic reversal since Marie Antoinette baked a gluten-free cake.

But to understand this present outrage, we must churn backward, into a history every dairy-loving debutante has tried to forget.

The Original Scandal: A War in Yellow and Pink

In the buttered-up world of the 19th century, there was but one queen of the tea table: butter itself. Churned by hand, kissed by cream, and praised in parlor poems, it reigned supreme in both taste and class.

Until, that is, margarine crashed the soiree.

Invented in 1869 by a French chemist and promptly hijacked by cost-conscious bakers, margarine was everything butter was not: cheap, industrial, and gasp tropical. You see, margarine had the gall to be made from coconut oil, palm oil, and later soybeans, a veritable parade of exotic, colonial fats unworthy of the English muffin.

The dairy industry did not take this lightly.

By the 1920s, butter barons were shrieking from the rooftops, denouncing margarine as a “product of cocoanut cows“, a term dripping in disdain for both tropical agriculture and the colonial origins of margarine’s oils. Never mind that cows do not, in fact, grow on trees.

Laws were passed. Margarine was banned outright in Canada in 1886. When re-legalized decades later, it was forced to wear a dye, bright pink or garish yellow, to distinguish it from “real” butter. A culinary scarlet letter.

In the U.S., it was far worse. In some states, margarine could not be sold colored. In others, it was taxed, regulated, or, my personal favorite, prescribed. Yes, dears, in Wisconsin, margarine was a controlled substance. One needed a note from a physician to enjoy their toast with tropical lubrication.

This was not a health policy. It was a smear campaign, literally.

The butter elite painted margarine as a danger to home, health, and heritage. And yet, the very people who smeared it with pink dye would soon commit the same crime. But let us not leap before the scandal has simmered…

Butter’s Triumphant Return… And the Seeds of Treachery

With the decline of trans fats and the rise of “natural” everything, butter staged a triumphant comeback in the early 2000s. No longer the greasy shame of 1980s diet culture, she emerged reborn, artisanal, grass-fed, cultured, and oh-so-Instagrammable.

She was rustic luxury. Pastoral seduction. The dairy goddess re-crowned.

Margarine slinked away into the shadows, sold only to those too frugal or too uninformed to know the culinary tides had turned.

But butter, dear readers, had a secret. And as we know, it is always the polished ones who harbor the darkest truths.

The Buttergate Affair: When the Queen Turned to Palm

As the pandemic swept across the globe and our ovens ignited in defiance, butter demand skyrocketed. Canada, like much of the world, found itself in a baking renaissance. Banana bread. Scones. Shortbread. Whipped coffee with a buttery biscuit on the side.

But how does one meet such demand when dairy herds are smaller and supply chains frayed?

One feeds the cows palm fat.

Yes, you heard correctly. In an effort to raise milk fat yields, many Canadian dairy farms began supplementing cow diets with palm-derived fat, rich in palmitic acid, a substance known for making fats firmer.

The very tropical oil once scorned in margarine was now entering butter through the cow.

Let us sip that tea again: tropical oils were once called unnatural, colonial, and corrupt. Entire provinces passed laws to humiliate margarine into submission. And now, butter, the purist’s spread, had become her.

She didn’t just absorb her rival. She fed her cows the very thing she once demonized.

The betrayal was not just culinary. It was moral. It was historical. It was deeply… spreadable.

The Denial, The Science, and the Public Uproar

When consumers complained, rightfully, with torn toast and broken hearts, Dairy Farmers of Canada responded with cool indifference.

“There’s no firm evidence,” they claimed, ironically.

But scientists, unlike dairy lobbyists, have instruments. And those instruments confirmed what our knives already knew: butter samples with higher levels of palmitic acid were measurably harder. Peer-reviewed studies proved it. Even industry groups quietly admitted palm oil might be the reason.

Eventually, the DFC advised farmers to pause the practice.

But one does not unring a butter bell.

From Cocoanut Cows to Palm-Fed Heifers

Let us take one last stroll through the irony.

In the 1920s, margarine was ridiculed as the bastard child of “cocoanut cows.” Dairy farmers clutched their pearls, shamed its tropical fats, and lobbied to keep it away from honest tables.

A century later, under the quiet cover of pandemic logistics, those same tropical oils were fed directly to Canadian cows to make more butter.

Butter, that paragon of purity, had become the very thing she once despised. A powdered, palm-fed, factory-fortified echo of herself.

And you thought toast was safe.

The Aftertaste of Scandal

To this day, many Canadians insist their butter has never quite returned to its former softness. Some import European brands. Some churn at home. Others simply lower their standards and their toast expectations.

But one thing is clear: butter is no longer just butter. It is image. It is history. It is marketing. It is memory.

And it is most certainly a scandal.

So the next time you find your knife stalling against a suspiciously firm pat of “pure Canadian butter,” ask yourself,

Is this dairy devotion…
or just a well-dressed margarine in disguise?

Yours in salted outrage,

Lady Simmertown