Butter Butters Better

When I moved to New Zealand in the mid-80s, one of the many things I didn't know about the place* was that I was emigrating to a Dairy Super Power. NZ is a small economy and so export earnings are important. Back then, dairy was the biggest export earner, and every Kiwi I met seemed to consume a lot of milk products.

Cheese was marketed as "The Great New Zealand 1-Kg" - none of this mucking around with 500g blocks. And butter, though I may be wrong about this, advertised as "Butter butters better". Great, catchy slogan. Everyone I met used butter, and in seemingly vast quantities. I honestly do not know how companies making margarine survived - their product seemed to be regarded with universal hostility.

Coming from Australia, (with a pretty big dairy industry itself) I could barely remember eating butter. I'd grown up on ads for Meadow Lea and had a horror of fats that weren't polyunsaturated - not that I'd really known what it meant. I got used to eating butter, who wouldn't? Then I moved to the UK.

Britain was not all about butter, instead it had a rather schizoid relationship with food. You have to remember the government there had been (at the very least) economical with the truth about links between Mad Cow Disease and CJD, so there was a deal of justifiable suspicion about the food industry. But at the same time, organic food was getting going and British people have terrific exposure to some of the great food cultures of the world: France, Italy, Spain etc. The Brits were just inventing the gastro-pub, a brilliant concept that combines two of my favourite things. Indeed, after they brought the licencing laws into the (then) 20th Century, it became all too possible, in those happy days when I didn't have children but did have a high disposable income, to go into a gastropub for Sunday lunch and not be able to get away until say, 8ish. Not that any of this got me back to butter.

In fact, I've only just made the return trip, this very week. Marge will be leaving our household, along with a lot of the biscuits we've been buying. We're going to make more of our own, because that way we'll really know what's in them. White bread, along with it's delicious variant, the fresh white roll, is being banished to the weekend. And there will be no more yoghurt-like products with long lists of ingredients being handed over to the kids.

This might seem a little schizoid too - going back to butter but embracing the dense, multi-grain bread. But there is a logic to it. After talking to Michael Pollan and reading his book, we're embracing proper foods that have been less mucked about with. We already eat a lot of fruit and fair few vegies but we could do with eating a bit less meat. I can't imagine giving it up, compelling as the environmental argument is, but eating less - yes, that I can do. In fact eating less of everything is a good idea and the first baby steps down that track are now being taken.

Food is one of life's great pleasures and I don't plan to don the gastronomical equivalent of a hairshirt. Proper foods - the kind your great grandmother would recognise as foods - in proper portions, properly savoured - that's the way the French and Italians do it. I think they're onto something.

*Australians are woefully ignorant about New Zealand, whereas Kiwis know a fair bit about Australia. Their media has quite a few stories about Australia and Australians; our media covers the All Blacks and the odd earthquake or volcanic eruption. It's a classic, big brother/little brother thing and explains a bit of why they love to beat us at anything.