Where’s The Butter?
It’s not where you think it is. Not long ago, someone was treating me to breakfast and took me to I.H.O.P. I asked the waiter if he could bring me butter, and he brought me margarine.
“Excuse me,” I asked him politely, “but do you have any butter butter? Real butter, I mean, not margarine?” His momentarily confused expression quickly passed, and then he promised to go ask his manager.
Five minutes later, the manager came out and asked me what I wanted. I reiterated that I simply wanted some butter. I wasn’t trying to be a pain, but surely the restaurant had real butter somewhere back in the kitchen.
Five minutes later, he returned. “We don’t have any butter,” he said.
Making this discovery started my quest. I wanted to see how many restaurants even had butter.
Nearly half a year later, and can you guess what I’ve discovered?
One. One restaurant out of dozens. Over the past 6 months, I’ve eaten out more than I have at any other time in my life. I’ve been to small town cafes and expensive fine dining. I’ve been to the local, hip places serving grass-fed beef and the major restaraunts dishing up oysters and pate. These places all have their pitfalls — almost no restaurant serves the same food I eat when I’m at home. But you’d expect more of them to have butter, wouldn’t you?
I think butter has gone the way of broth. I’ll never forget the conversation I had a couple of years ago in a little Mexican taqueria near my house. Their rice had clearly been cooked in broth, so I asked if they made the broth themselves.
“Oh yes,” the head cook replied.
“So, you boil the chicken carcass to make your broth?”
“Oh no,” he said frowning. “We get our broth dehydrated, like a bullion, and add hot water.”
That taqueria cook was confused. So was the waiter at I.H.O.P.
If I’d ordered Coke, they wouldn’t just bring me a Pepsi without telling me first. Someone would say, “We don’t serve Coca Cola products here.”
Yet when I ask for butter, I get margarine. When I ask for butter again, I get confused looks. When I ask if a broth is homemade, I’m told yes. Since when is margarine butter? Or adding water to a mix “homemade”?
We’ve got a long way to go, people.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy when a place serves up grass-fed beef, or makes the switch to all organic dairy or locally-grown produce.
But when you can ask for butter and get margarine, over and over and over again, in restaurant after restaurant, you know we’ve got a long way to go.
“You teach. You teach. You teach.” Amen, Weston A. Price!
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