When solid matter becomes liquid, it can look beautiful and the result can be disappointing. For example, these colorful bathtub balls, which dissolve nicely in hot water, but rarely eliminate real tension. Or headache pills. With a tingling noise, a tablet disappears telegenic in a glass of water, but when drunk it only tastes like windscreen wiper fluid. It’s different with butter.
When a stick of butter melts and you witness yellow slowly turning to gold, the world is peaceful for a moment. It is even more peaceful when you can eat the gold afterwards, on boiled potatoes, on asparagus or as a revitalizing measure for a roll that has become much too hard.
Only: With a part of this lightness it is slowly over. Since the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, the prices for petrol, electricity and broccoli have risen. But according to the Federal Statistical Office, hardly any other product was as much more expensive than butter, namely 56 percent, compared to the previous year. The affordable luxury in the form of bars, which can enrich every taste of mediocrity like hardly any other food, is developing into something exclusive.
The German consumes six kilos of butter every year
It’s a pity, above all, because people can’t do without their butter. The German consumes a good six kilograms of butter every year. Delicately sawn off the block, thickly spread under sausage and Nutella, curled up on the breakfast buffet, mixed in a cake tin, a little rancid in the refrigerator of the six-person flat share. Regardless of the condition – if in doubt, you decide against the best-before date. And for the butter. Because she has a leap of faith. Because it reliably makes the sweet sweeter and the savory reliably saltier.
Butter carries flavor, everyone knows that. But the responsibility that this food also bears for humans is much greater. It helps the German, who is not always emotional, to communicate his innermost being with the phrase “everything in butter”. There is even a well-known German metalcore band that owes their success in part to their name: We Butter the Bread with Butter. And if it had been German and not French draftsmen who created Asterix and Obelix, Obelix would probably have had to fall into a pot of butter. Whereby: The French consume two kilograms more butter per year than the Germans.
The golden topping seems immune to calls for more health awareness and warnings about cholesterol: Germans have been consuming their butter at a consistently high level for decades. In 1999 consumption was almost seven kilograms a year, in 2009 it was 5.6. But viewed over a longer period of time, consumption remains constant. The butter suits the vegetarian society, which is gradually turning away from meat, but veganism is going too far.
Butter as a luxury good? Not a good sign
Butter has even conquered its place in the particularly contemporary diet. So-called bulletproof coffee is consumed by busy people who don’t have time for a breakfast that requires chewing. The drink consists of classic coffee, a special oil – and a good portion of butter. This should stimulate fat burning and support the endurance of the body. But if Bulletproof drinkers were honest, they’d admit: Watching the butter meditatively melt into the coffee is what it’s all about.
So now, at least for people with a small checking account, such a drink is increasingly becoming something you have to be able to afford. And that’s not a good sign: Germany may be a long way from being active in the war itself, and yet as a lover of butter you come across what Kurt Tucholsky once wrote about his wartime experiences, when food was always expensive and become close. It suggests an uncomfortable buttery hubris: “Whoever has the butter gets cheeky.”