9 ms·

Buttergate: Why are Canadians complaining about hard butter?

68 points by curmudgeon22 6y ago

sradman 6y ago
> Adding palm oil-based energy supplements to cow feed is a decades-old practice said to increase the milk output of cows and increase the milk's fat content. > Little research has been done on the true impact of palm oil in dairy, but agricultural experts say butter made from cows fed with palm oil has a higher melting point and, therefore, may be harder to spread at room temperature. The article conflates palm oil in cow feed with palm oil in dairy. The lipid profile of butter can be measured as can its physical properties. Animal feed transparency is never going to be pretty.
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  Could just be a simple typo for "impact of palm oil ON dairy"?
  - sradman 6y ago
    I’m ok with the language used. It’s more of a theme throughout the article that I’m concerned about. Palm oil in cow feed can impact the dairy industry and it can impact the properties of the product; I want to understand both types of impacts.
- anonymfus 6y ago
  My reading there is that "in dairy" means not in the dairy products, but in the dairy industry.
ljp_206 6y ago
I wouldn't blame a Canadian for potentially 'paranoid' complaints around groceries; not after the 2018 bread price fixing scandal.
- krrrh 6y ago
  Binyamin Applebaum attempting a gotcha moment with Buttigieg on this topic is one of the funniest moments from last year’s election. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2SxQa1RqQ&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2SxQa1RqQ&feature=youtu.be
Taniwha 6y ago
heh - when I was a kid in New Zealand we had a year when the butter was 'wrong' (mostly wrong colour, wrong amount of salt) .... it was the end of the cold war (late 70s or early 80s) and the US had a 'butter mountain' basically a giant surplus of government subsidised butter they couldn't sell on the US market, nor on the world market without depressing the entire market. NZ's dairy industry (giant farmer co-ops) solved this problem, because there was a viable market for that butter - Russia, which the US didn't want to trade with, so NZ bought the US butter, sold it in NZ (yuck, doesn't taste like/look like our butter!) and sold domestic NZ butter to Russia
- jfk13 6y ago
  Should've just repackaged the US butter, labelled it as "packaged in New Zealand", and resold that to the Russians at a hefty markup.
gjm11 6y ago
It delights me that right now this article about butter is immediately above "Total Cookie Protection" on the HN front page.
bregma 6y ago
Listen. I live in Canada, and butter is hard at room temperature from September through June because room temperature stays below 20. In fact, for at least a few days every year, even water gets hard in my kitchen. It is Cold here in winter. Between hard butter and cold coffee/tea this is why every Canadian kitchen has a microwave. I have also come to think of the two summer months as 'soft butter season' because I can just spread it directly on my toast in the morning.
- permo-w 6y ago
  Perhaps I’m wrong, but my assumption is that the people making these complaints have central heating and aren’t just forgetting that it gets cold in Canada
  - mewse-hn 6y ago
    As another canadian: we all have central heating or we'd die, what GP is saying is that confirmation bias may be in play here because it's the dead of winter and butter is going to be harder than the summer months anyway.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      Right, yes, before central heating came along (in, what, the '60s?) everyone was dead.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        They wore different clothes in winter back then.
- rini17 6y ago
  Wow, I don't know anyone who actually has heating temp set below 20C. I have 21 myself at home and often get complaints it's too cold. (eastern europe) To stay ontopic, I completely gave up spreading the butter as it's stored in the fridge year round. Just cutting thin slices and laying them on the bread is ok.
hahajk 6y ago
I noticed this too only a few months ago! Although I live in the US. I chalked it up to a cold kitchen in the winter. I wonder if it is an issue in the US too but Americans don’t leave their butter out as much as other countries.
harryf 6y ago
> Food experts have churned up palm fat in cow feed as a likely culprit. I think these type of stories are what journalists live for. "Did you see how I used 'churned up' in that sentence? Hahaha"
KentGeek 6y ago
I'm a little skeptical that the properties of palm oil that could raise the melting point of butter would survive the cow's digestion process. In any case, the experiments to prove the relationship should be almost trivially easy, right?
- AlanYx 6y ago
  It's the palmitic acid content of the butter that's usually responsible for changes in the melting point. Palm oil feedstocks do result in increased palmitic acid content of milk, see e.g.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030207715837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203020... ("As the intake of palmitic acid increased with the PALM diets, milk palmitic acid concentrations were increased (P < 0.0001). When 1,500 g/d of PALM was consumed, milk palmitic acid concentration was increased by 50% compared with the control.")
motohagiography 6y ago
Some years ago the dairy monopoly in Canada caused a schism in its conservative party because the dairy board people have so much power. What was set up as a guaranteed market for farmers has become an oligopoly of agribusiness. Quebec has this for maple syrup as well. It's corruption. Dairy quota discussions quickly become a proxy for the role of the federal government. They say they maintain "good" prices for both producers and consumers, but the price inflation of cheese and beef has been absurd and cheese has become a luxury good. What it means is that it is effectively illegal to start a dairy farm or a small scale cheese making operation. There is more enforcement against black market raw milk products than there is against meth dealers. The regulators insist it's to protect people from being poisoned, but it's really to protect the monopoly power and political sway. If you want to get a few cows and start an artisinal cheese business and grow it, you are out of luck. The city administrative classes hate rural people and they create and maintain these "safety" regulations to stamp out the culture. The country is so bland they have effectively succeeded. It's never just about butter. :)
- dstick 6y ago
  Saw a documentary about that a while back. Just Googled it for anyone that's interested in how stuff like this starts and is maintained exactly like the parent describes: The Maple Syrup Heist on Netflix.
- canucktrash669 6y ago
  I’ve seen an analysis a while back showing that compared to US and EU, Canada subsidized agriculture to a lesser extent by a few multiples. Quotas might effectively shift the cost of subsidies to consumers, but they’re still lower. Now, if I could find this now.
  - BelenusMordred 6y ago
    This isn't a subsidy though, it's quotas, intentional protection from superior competition entering the market.
- throw0101a 6y ago
diego_moita 6y ago
Eh? And what do you want Canadians to complain about? Winter, when Texas goes dark with a little snow? Covid, when most of the developed world is worse than Canada? That's the biggest problem on being Canadian, it's hard to find something to bitch about. When you live in a nice country all your dramas become pathetic. Btw, Canadian butter is excellent, even some of the cheapest ones. I use the President's Choice brand and like it.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I'm fairly certain you have far greater problems than hard butter. Like that veritable mountain of sulfur that you guys have no clue with what to do... https://www.southernfriedscience.com/alberta-canada-is-the-proud-owner-of-the-largest-man-made-pyramid-on-the-planet/ https://www.southernfriedscience.com/alberta-canada-is-the-p...
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  >That's the biggest problem on being Canadian, it's hard to find something to bitch about. When you live in a nice country all your dramas become pathetic. Utterly clueless.
mabbo 6y ago
Some may read this and naturally say "So buy butter from another country!". I'm here to tell you that this is basically impossible due to protectionist laws. There are theoretically ways to import butter to Canada, but you need a special license, and there are very strict quotas. Generally, only large dairy corporations can get them, and only to handle major shortage. In my entire life spent mostly in Canada, I have never seen butter being advertised as being from another country. Cheese, definitely, but never butter. Even trying to bring some home with you from a vacation isn't allowed. It would be taken if declared at the border, and destroyed. Failure to declare it is a crime. Why? The Canadian dairy industry is an incredibly powerful lobby group. All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that". Liberal governments and Conservative governments alike pander to them endlessly.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I know this is a serious issue for Canadians, but I can't help but laugh my ass off at the fact that you literally have an American-Prohibition-Era "Big Dairy" cartel that fucking extorts the little guy through government interference and corruption. I'm LOL'ing just thinking about it.
  - mabbo 6y ago
    It's one of those things that if you think too hard about it, you laugh, until you realize that it's actually real and you live under it's nonsense and then you cry instead.
  - WanderPanda 6y ago
    As long as it is restricted to dairy it's funny, but whats really sad is that a majority of people want ever more of this kind of centralization and regulation. I have a feeling that many western countries are on a slow downwards spiral to become "shithole countries". Let's see whose constitution is strongest and allows the people to buy the f*ing dairy they want. I bet this will not be our EU, the protectionist mastermind

68 points by curmudgeon22 6y ago

> Adding palm oil-based energy supplements to cow feed is a decades-old practice said to increase the milk output of cows and increase the milk's fat content. > Little research has been done on the true impact of palm oil in dairy, but agricultural experts say butter made from cows fed with palm oil has a higher melting point and, therefore, may be harder to spread at room temperature. The article conflates palm oil in cow feed with palm oil in dairy. The lipid profile of butter can be measured as can its physical properties. Animal feed transparency is never going to be pretty.

ThePadawan 6y ago
Could just be a simple typo for "impact of palm oil ON dairy"?
- sradman 6y ago
  I’m ok with the language used. It’s more of a theme throughout the article that I’m concerned about. Palm oil in cow feed can impact the dairy industry and it can impact the properties of the product; I want to understand both types of impacts.
anonymfus 6y ago
My reading there is that "in dairy" means not in the dairy products, but in the dairy industry.

ljp_206 6y ago

I wouldn't blame a Canadian for potentially 'paranoid' complaints around groceries; not after the 2018 bread price fixing scandal.

krrrh 6y ago
Binyamin Applebaum attempting a gotcha moment with Buttigieg on this topic is one of the funniest moments from last year’s election. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2SxQa1RqQ&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2SxQa1RqQ&feature=youtu.be

Taniwha 6y ago

heh - when I was a kid in New Zealand we had a year when the butter was 'wrong' (mostly wrong colour, wrong amount of salt) .... it was the end of the cold war (late 70s or early 80s) and the US had a 'butter mountain' basically a giant surplus of government subsidised butter they couldn't sell on the US market, nor on the world market without depressing the entire market. NZ's dairy industry (giant farmer co-ops) solved this problem, because there was a viable market for that butter - Russia, which the US didn't want to trade with, so NZ bought the US butter, sold it in NZ (yuck, doesn't taste like/look like our butter!) and sold domestic NZ butter to Russia

jfk13 6y ago
Should've just repackaged the US butter, labelled it as "packaged in New Zealand", and resold that to the Russians at a hefty markup.

gjm11 6y ago

It delights me that right now this article about butter is immediately above "Total Cookie Protection" on the HN front page.

bregma 6y ago

Listen. I live in Canada, and butter is hard at room temperature from September through June because room temperature stays below 20. In fact, for at least a few days every year, even water gets hard in my kitchen. It is Cold here in winter. Between hard butter and cold coffee/tea this is why every Canadian kitchen has a microwave. I have also come to think of the two summer months as 'soft butter season' because I can just spread it directly on my toast in the morning.

permo-w 6y ago
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my assumption is that the people making these complaints have central heating and aren’t just forgetting that it gets cold in Canada
- mewse-hn 6y ago
  As another canadian: we all have central heating or we'd die, what GP is saying is that confirmation bias may be in play here because it's the dead of winter and butter is going to be harder than the summer months anyway.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Right, yes, before central heating came along (in, what, the '60s?) everyone was dead.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      They wore different clothes in winter back then.
rini17 6y ago
Wow, I don't know anyone who actually has heating temp set below 20C. I have 21 myself at home and often get complaints it's too cold. (eastern europe) To stay ontopic, I completely gave up spreading the butter as it's stored in the fridge year round. Just cutting thin slices and laying them on the bread is ok.

hahajk 6y ago

I noticed this too only a few months ago! Although I live in the US. I chalked it up to a cold kitchen in the winter. I wonder if it is an issue in the US too but Americans don’t leave their butter out as much as other countries.

harryf 6y ago

> Food experts have churned up palm fat in cow feed as a likely culprit. I think these type of stories are what journalists live for. "Did you see how I used 'churned up' in that sentence? Hahaha"

KentGeek 6y ago

I'm a little skeptical that the properties of palm oil that could raise the melting point of butter would survive the cow's digestion process. In any case, the experiments to prove the relationship should be almost trivially easy, right?

AlanYx 6y ago
It's the palmitic acid content of the butter that's usually responsible for changes in the melting point. Palm oil feedstocks do result in increased palmitic acid content of milk, see e.g.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030207715837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203020... ("As the intake of palmitic acid increased with the PALM diets, milk palmitic acid concentrations were increased (P < 0.0001). When 1,500 g/d of PALM was consumed, milk palmitic acid concentration was increased by 50% compared with the control.")

motohagiography 6y ago

Some years ago the dairy monopoly in Canada caused a schism in its conservative party because the dairy board people have so much power. What was set up as a guaranteed market for farmers has become an oligopoly of agribusiness. Quebec has this for maple syrup as well. It's corruption. Dairy quota discussions quickly become a proxy for the role of the federal government. They say they maintain "good" prices for both producers and consumers, but the price inflation of cheese and beef has been absurd and cheese has become a luxury good. What it means is that it is effectively illegal to start a dairy farm or a small scale cheese making operation. There is more enforcement against black market raw milk products than there is against meth dealers. The regulators insist it's to protect people from being poisoned, but it's really to protect the monopoly power and political sway. If you want to get a few cows and start an artisinal cheese business and grow it, you are out of luck. The city administrative classes hate rural people and they create and maintain these "safety" regulations to stamp out the culture. The country is so bland they have effectively succeeded. It's never just about butter. :)

dstick 6y ago
Saw a documentary about that a while back. Just Googled it for anyone that's interested in how stuff like this starts and is maintained exactly like the parent describes: The Maple Syrup Heist on Netflix.
canucktrash669 6y ago
I’ve seen an analysis a while back showing that compared to US and EU, Canada subsidized agriculture to a lesser extent by a few multiples. Quotas might effectively shift the cost of subsidies to consumers, but they’re still lower. Now, if I could find this now.
- BelenusMordred 6y ago
  This isn't a subsidy though, it's quotas, intentional protection from superior competition entering the market.
throw0101a 6y ago

diego_moita 6y ago

Eh? And what do you want Canadians to complain about? Winter, when Texas goes dark with a little snow? Covid, when most of the developed world is worse than Canada? That's the biggest problem on being Canadian, it's hard to find something to bitch about. When you live in a nice country all your dramas become pathetic. Btw, Canadian butter is excellent, even some of the cheapest ones. I use the President's Choice brand and like it.

cbozeman 6y ago
I'm fairly certain you have far greater problems than hard butter. Like that veritable mountain of sulfur that you guys have no clue with what to do... https://www.southernfriedscience.com/alberta-canada-is-the-proud-owner-of-the-largest-man-made-pyramid-on-the-planet/ https://www.southernfriedscience.com/alberta-canada-is-the-p...
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
>That's the biggest problem on being Canadian, it's hard to find something to bitch about. When you live in a nice country all your dramas become pathetic. Utterly clueless.

mabbo 6y ago

Some may read this and naturally say "So buy butter from another country!". I'm here to tell you that this is basically impossible due to protectionist laws. There are theoretically ways to import butter to Canada, but you need a special license, and there are very strict quotas. Generally, only large dairy corporations can get them, and only to handle major shortage. In my entire life spent mostly in Canada, I have never seen butter being advertised as being from another country. Cheese, definitely, but never butter. Even trying to bring some home with you from a vacation isn't allowed. It would be taken if declared at the border, and destroyed. Failure to declare it is a crime. Why? The Canadian dairy industry is an incredibly powerful lobby group. All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that". Liberal governments and Conservative governments alike pander to them endlessly.

cbozeman 6y ago
I know this is a serious issue for Canadians, but I can't help but laugh my ass off at the fact that you literally have an American-Prohibition-Era "Big Dairy" cartel that fucking extorts the little guy through government interference and corruption. I'm LOL'ing just thinking about it.
- mabbo 6y ago
  It's one of those things that if you think too hard about it, you laugh, until you realize that it's actually real and you live under it's nonsense and then you cry instead.
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  As long as it is restricted to dairy it's funny, but whats really sad is that a majority of people want ever more of this kind of centralization and regulation. I have a feeling that many western countries are on a slow downwards spiral to become "shithole countries". Let's see whose constitution is strongest and allows the people to buy the f*ing dairy they want. I bet this will not be our EU, the protectionist mastermind