What about butter, bud?

So I'm reading this article in the New York Times this morning, about food, when I run across the following passage.

These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

And I'm thinking, what about butter. I don't know.

See, I am conflicted about butter. No, not conflicted, traumatized. Seriously traumatized. The single most traumatizing thing in my entire life - more traumatizing, even, than the Bomb - is butter.

I was brought up like every right-thinking person to believe butter was good. I mean, it comes from milk, doesn't it? And milk is good. Isn't it? And better, everything tastes better with butter (somehow I feel there's a tune that goes with that). I mean, everybody knew that, didn't they? There were even legends during the war (I'm talking about WWII here, children, of course) about submariners coming back from long patrols and ordering butter sandwiches because, well, they knew it too.

And what's more, by the time this "margarine" stuff came on the scene I lived in Minnesota, a dairy state, where my unshakable belief in the righteous goodness of butter was enforced by law. So, while my parents had friends who occasionally drove to Chicago and smuggled - yes I said smuggled - back one-pound boxes of margarine that were cut into quarter-pound sticks and colored yellow - yes, I said yellow - so even though it didn't taste like butter it sort of looked like butter and therefore we knew there was such a thing, the only margarine we could buy in Minnesota was packaged in one-pound plastic bags and was white. And my mother bought it anyway because her belief in the righteousness of technology was even greater than her belief in butter, go figure that.

The only good part was the yellow dye. Packaged subversively inside every plastic bag of white margarine was a little capsule of yellow dye. So the drill was, you would let the margarine warm up until it was soft and squishy, and then you would pinch the capsule inside the bag and knead the margarine until the whole thing turned into a sort of amorphous blob of blotchy yellow stuff, and then you'd get it cold again and when it was hard enough you'd cut it into blotchy yellow amorphous chunks and that, of course, wasn't butter, but technology marches on. The only thing good about it was it was fun to squeeze the little yellow pill. My sister wanted to do it too so we had to take turns. Don't get me started about that.

Then, later, I got old enough to leave Minnesota and live in strange, exotic places where the margarine was yellow to begin with and came in a regular box and looked like butter, just didn't taste like butter. And then in the 80s or thereabouts came the news that henceforth anyone eating butter would immediately drop over dead of clogged arteries so, gradually, over time (maybe I'm just a slow clogger) I gave up eating butter entirely and just ate that stuff. Margarine. It was painful. Depressing. Discouraging.

Until they discovered trans-fats and it turned out eating margarine was worse, worse than eating butter, worse than anything, worse than the Bomb, even, so where does that leave me now? Bitter, is where. Bitter about butter. After all that sacrifice, butter is better?

So no, I'm not conflicted about butter. Traumatized, yes, but not conflicted. Screw margarine, is what I say.

And pass the butter. Please.