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

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