That's exactly what I had in mind but I didn't want to sound like a butter commercial XD
I grew up with it and I'm baffled by what passes for butter in the American market. We probably spend twice as much on food as is average for the amount we consume, but it seems both tastier and healthier. Part of why I have negative opinions of capitalism is the inescapable fact that the baseline of food quality is so bad. The most popular and well-known food brands, which take up the most shelf space in most supermarkets and are thus the default choice for many consumers are just awful. They're somewhat-to-direly awful nutritionally, they don't taste good, and many people are so conditioned to sugar and artificial flavors that they find real food weird at first.
I feel like this is a serious social problem. What seems like a large majority of Americans don't know how to eat well and this causes all kinds of second-order problems - not just things like obesity and diabetes, but things like criminal recidivism too. The idea of nutrition and healthy eating in prisons is treated by most people as a contradiction in terms, as if diet didn't have any impact on self-control, learning ability and other factors that are likely to impact future behavior. (This is sadly far from an exclusively American problem.) When people aren't properly nourished they under stress and when they're under stress they make poor decisions.
lower middle class and struggling people can't afford to eat well and don't have the time to cook. this probably won't change for another 30 years. sadly, most will probably die before this problem is fully addressed.
don't worry, all the rich educated people already know exactly what the deal is. just take a look at any expensive restaurant menu or high end supermarket in california, texas, new york, etc.
From what I've seen, most simply don't have the desire to eat well, nor learn how to do so affordably. Sure, they cannot eat grass-fed beef with sweet potatoes, wild mushrooms, and asparagus, but they can eat rice, microwaved green peas and a couple eggs with hot sauce, and still have a nutritionally complete meal. Cheaper and faster than any fastfood. McDonald's arguably tastes better, though.
Nope. You can eat healthy even if you're poor; it's just more boring and repetitive. Most of what I know about nutrition and cooking I learned in high school, which was a) long ago and b) nothing fancy by American standards. I make a fuss about this stuff because I've got a lot of experience of being poor and I'm keenly aware of the tricky challenges of making food choices when you have very little money.
I'd ask for a refund on that snide tone if I were you, it's not helping your argument.
The best butter I've ever had is Smjor from Iceland. It's incredible. Even compared to Kerrygold. Whole Foods sometimes had it. When available we usually buy very large quantities of it.
Intrigued but skeptical. There's really a taste difference? How do you account for that? Isn't butter just fat and water? I eat lots of butter, but I've never shopped around. The only label comparison I ever did was when I saw Plugra on the shelves and I went to check if it had a different butterfat content from store-brand butter. (As the name would imply.) It didn't, and I bought store-brand.
Butter isn't a chemical mixture. It's a food made from a living animal. As with all things in nature, it will vary depending on the animal and its health. This kind of reductionist and industrial attitude towards food is detrimental to nutrition and overall. In our aim to standardize everything, we've forgotten the animals and the farmers and our connection to food. In an agricultural society you would have been laughed at if you said "isn't all butter the same?"
Well, I have nothing to go on but the label, which is reductionist in the extreme. Which is why I ask what the difference is. I'm really most interested in the qualitative difference, not the exact amino acid composition. Sibling comments inform me that Kerrygold is more delicious than what my grocer stocks. In what way? What is different about the manner in which it's produced?
Most dairy cows in Ireland (where Kerrygold comes from) are Jersey cows, the fat content of whose milk is higher to start with, which makes it smoother and gives it a yellower color. There's also a little more salt in it, I think.
But as I said the label will only take you so far. If you want to know what something tastes like you need to put it in your mouth and chew it for a while. If you're not willing to experiment then you're going to miss out on all kinds of delicious things. The price of sometimes buying things and discovering that you don't enjoy them is well worth it.
This baffles me. How on earth are you going to know whether you might prefer eating something without trying it? The Nutrition Facts label isn't going to tell you how it tastes. I love those labels and refer to them regularly but reading too much into it is like trying to figure out someone's personality from their height, weight and other basic statistics.
What's "just fat"? "fat" is a term for a whole category of things (esters of glycerol and fatty acids), not just one specific substance, and fat in butter contains all kinds of trace stuff that isn't strictly a "fat molecule".
And I'll third it! As an Irishman living abroad I find most local butters extremely tasteless. Luckily it's not too hard to find Kerrygold in most supermarkets in the UK.
