Image via WikipediaWell, my friends, it's bad enough to have discovered that the English are slobs like the rest of us, and that "Downton Abbey" and all those Jane Austen movies are shams--shams!--to make Americans feel bad about themselves and their nasally accents. But now I find out that the Germans are hoarding all the good butter. That's right! Last week my husband came home from this high-end speciality grocery store with a gold-foiled block of German butter. I'm all, "German butter? What's the carbon footprint on that baby?" But then I tried the German butter. Oh. My. God. It was like no butter I'd ever tasted. It was like someone took a cloud and sprinkled it with little baby angel smiles. I was simultaneously exhilarated and ashamed. Yes, ashamed! All these years I thought I understood butter; I thought I had a special connection with butter, and now the whole thing seems so cheap. I didn't even know what good butter was. I was eating a sad facsimile of butter. I was eating stressed-out cow butter, because, really, what else would make our butter so inferior? Clearly, it's the over-worked cows who are literally squeezed for all their worth when all they really want is a humane work schedule and five weeks of guaranteed vacation.
For me, it's the Greek yogurt debacle all over! (Yeah! That was a pretty traumatic discovery too.) Now I'm stuck with American butter. Obviously, I can't afford to eat German butter all the time. It's expensive and addictively, dangerously delicious. Yet, while deprived of it myself, I now know that in Europe people are probably so awash in good butter that they're using the unsalted kind as Chapstick. And they're enjoying it too. They are feasting on it everyday, feasting and laughing, and resolute in the knowledge that while they eat good butter, we're the ones who get obese.
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