Buttergate
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Buttergate, Buttergate is here and it's gonna be something that... Listen, I tried to write a Buttergate song. I'm Jan Arden. We're here with Caitlin Green, Adam Karsh. Caitlin,

You got a little good news about Spotify, but I heart radio. What's going on? I do. It's kind of fun. So, I mean, there might be some people who are listening to us on Spotify for the first time, maybe today. Hello, Spotify. Because we're of course carried on. I heart radio. So that's sort of our, like, that's our, our home. It's,

It's our mothership. It is our mothership. But Spotify is shining a little spotlight on us this month, which we are so thankful for and love. But normally we would be telling everyone you subscribe to us on iHeartRadio and that way you get a little notification as soon as we release a new episode. So if you like Buttergate,

If you want to be notified about controversies surrounding the Canadian dairy industry, the world's worst sales pitch. But no, really, we do talk a lot about some really cool stuff. So yeah, you want to subscribe to us on iHeart, even if you're listening to us for the first time on Spotify. And then hello, thank you for doing so. Canadian dairy won't be our sponsor anytime soon. And I wrote them a jingle anyway. Hey, it's free. Take it.

Canadian dairy really doesn't like our show. Oh my God. Julie Van Rosendahl is our special guest today. And Julie has been a friend of the show for a long time. And she noticed one day, she's going to tell you a lot more about it, but she noticed that her, she was confused as to how to make recipes that required room temperature butter. I'm going to let her tell you all about it. Anyway, it's a Canadian thing.

If that's your biggest problem, I guess you don't have any. Caitlin, you are moments away from having your little boy. We're so excited for you. We're going to be saying so long to you. This is our last podcast together for a little while. Our last recording session. Our last recording session. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, no, just our recording session. Sorry, I take everything back. I'm being very confusing. But anyway, Caitlin is just going to go and have a baby for a couple of minutes. No big deal.

Um, what size is your app? Do they, are they now just stopping telling you or? Yeah, they're just like, you know, I don't even look at this anymore. Just move on. It's probably a Volvo, right? It's, it's a small vehicle. It's a mini, it's a mini Cooper. Um, no, I think the last time I looked at the app that tells you what size the baby is, I think it said it was a cabbage patch doll. So it's like, it's a, it's a doll. It's like a baby doll that you remember having from, from a kid being a kid.

I thought, oh no, I was thinking we did fricking Care Bear. That's what it was. So now we're up to care. Listen, you're going to be so great. And I'm glad it's not me. No, it's going to be, it's going to be such an experience. What a life. I'm really happy for you and your husband and it's going to be wonderful. And I'm happy for your, for all your parents. I think it's so special with little grand people. And I know you're going to notice this, Caitlin.

You're going to be like, oh my God, they would never have let me get away with that. But my kid can get away with anything. There's something about scaling a generation. Yeah. I think they'll probably, he'll probably get more, maybe some more treats. Although I don't know, I was an only child girl. So I think I had my run of the house actually a little bit when I was growing up, but yeah, no, he'll be, he'll be getting the special treatment. I feel bad for, you know, my,

on my parents and my in-laws and everything, because that sort of hospital experience that you imagine having your whole life, like in the movies and stuff where the family's anxiously waiting in the hallway and they see the baby right away, like that is not happening. This is a coronial born in a pandemic situation.

It's just my husband and I who can go and there are lots of COVID protocols in place at the hospital. So everybody is waiting in a very 2021 fashion for a text or like an alert, a photo to be sent to them to tell them that the baby's here. Well, I'm going to be waiting. Adam, you're going to be waiting, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm sure you're going to call us as soon as it happens, right? You'll just FaceTime us. I'll just be in bed hanging out. I think I'll obviously check in with the show and let you guys know how I'm doing. I'll do the same thing I work on, of course, the Chum Morning Show. So I'll probably be checking

in with them as well shortly after and then sort of doing my thing trying to figure out how to keep this little new person alive I'd like to I had a couple of friends who were telling me some keys to positive thinking when you go into like labor and stuff to try to stay positive and one piece of advice I was given was to look at you and the baby as a teen instead of thinking of it as like get this baby out of me again kind of like the Hollywood version you'd think

And instead to view it as, you know, you guys are working together and that the baby is going through a heck of an experience being thrust out of their cozy little home into a cold, sterile world with all these giant people staring at them. Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. You often sort of neglect that part of the story. Is that true?

The baby is, he's got to do his work. And that always just blows my mind. He goes from like a little aqualung, you know, breathing in, breathing through the umbilical cord, I guess, getting all his oxygen that way to that first little puff of air. Yeah. It really truly is masterful. God, Darwin would, his whole idea of,

I just thought the whole thing is fascinating. I don't know what I was going to say about Darwin. I wasn't it's a stupid thing that I was even thinking of. But evolution, I guess that's where I was going. Yeah, first puff of air that you're like a little you're a little aqua baby. You're like little mini Aquaman. And then you're a land animal.

Yeah, you're just down there and your every need is covered and you're quite cozy. And then nature says to you, well, your head's just getting too big. You're going to get stuck if you hang in there any longer. So we need to push you out a little prematurely. You're not going to be able to walk. You won't be able to make rudimentary attempts to defend yourself. So we're giving you extra big eyes and cute features so that these two people don't abandon you and want to keep you alive. And here you go. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, anyway, we wish you all the luck and we can't wait to hear about what happens. It's such an exciting time. And boy, I know I talk about this a lot, but you think about that line of descendants as far back as you can see of all the women that, you know, did this.

Your mom got you here and your grandmother got her here and your great- It's like one of those carnival mirror things where you look in and you see like 18 billion of yourself. I know. And when you look back and you think of where our heritage takes us, genealogy is fascinating. Do you know a lot about your genealogy, you guys? No. I don't. I can only go back three generations and that's it. Have you tried, Adam, to go like on-

Have you contacted the Mormons? Have you contacted them? No, I can probably name my...

My great-grandparents, I didn't know them. I can only go back, as far as family members being alive, I can only go back to my four grandparents. I can't go back any further than that. I know of my great-grandparents. I know their names, but that's it. I don't know anything past that. Well, this is an interesting thing that I stumbled across. There's a thing, a new AI, kind of an app called Deep Nostalgia.

And it brings old photos to life, like really old photos. I don't know if you guys have a lot of family photos that, you know, obviously photographs have only been around for 180 years or something like that. But this app, and it's so weird if you look it up, you can go and find it on The Verge. It's sort of an online paper. But just Google Deep Nostalgia.

So it's an AI powered service that animates still photos. And it's become sort of, it's been on Twitter. Some people have like been showing stuff on there, like fake videos. It comes across as fake videos. But what the AI does is it takes these old photographs and the people blink and they move their heads and their mouths open. So you can have something from 1890 and put this app into this app

And this freaking thing moves around. I don't know if I'd want to see that or not. It's a company called MyHeritage, one word. And it uses this technology to make still photos move. I mean, if you look at it, it is the weirdest thing you've ever seen. Like if you had a picture of your mom as a 10-year-old,

this MyHeritage AI app, this deep nostalgia can make this thing move around.

It must be a play on because like I've so I've been mesmerized by deep fake videos for a long time. Yeah, this is I find this quite actually quite disturbing. So this sounds like it's like the cute version where it's like deep nostalgia where you can animate your old photos and old relatives. But I got sucked into the world of a deep fake Tom Cruise TikTok account.

And yes, yes. So, um, so for anyone who is unfamiliar with Tik TOK, it's a social media app and they do these little short videos. Uh, it's kind of like the updated version of vine for everyone who remembers vine. And what this is, is it's an entire account dedicated to fake

tom cruise videos you would like jan you would have no idea this wasn't tom cruise it is a cgi kind of overlay on a person who is acting in the way like vocally and stuff that tom cruise would act but it's his face animated it looks like him and it's very these deep fake videos they do it to politicians which is disconcerting because who knows what kind of stuff you could doctor there and it's been discussed a lot in hollywood for using it um

in as a stand in, say if somebody passes on in the middle of shooting or, you know, like they did this a little bit to a certain extent with Carrie Fisher in after she passed away with some Star Wars stuff. And it is getting to be so good that you honestly don't know if the person being featured is a deep fake video or if it's the real actor. And it's creepy. So so what's that going to mean to things like CCTV? Yeah.

For crimes. What's that going to mean to court cases where it's it's all contingent on, you know, having video footage of something like that concerns me. And I know they did a bit of that stuff with the American election. They had Biden stuttering or they had him doing that. He simply wasn't doing it.

Anyway, you've got 30 seconds to wrap this segment up, so you better think about that. I would just say that like everything that exists on the internet, this is just one more reason why you are going to have to make sure that the stuff that you are viewing is real. Because it could just be a deep fake video of a known figure, and they've managed to copy their image, their likeness, and the sound of their voice. Is this the 2021 version of airbrushing? Yeah.

It's darker, but yes. You're listening to the Jan Arden Podcast. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the Jan Arden Podcast. Maybe you're listening on Spotify, which is new because Spotify is shining a giant light on the Jan Arden Podcast. And we're so grateful for the month of March. So welcome aboard. And you can subscribe to us on iHeartRadio. And iHeartRadio has other podcasts too that you can subscribe to. My pal Marilyn Dennis has one.

My pal Lisa Laflamme has one. All the gals from the social have one. All the gals from the social. You can't miss those guys. They're always getting themselves into some kind of trouble. Julie Van Rosendahl, as mentioned, is with us today. She's going to be talking to us about Buttergate. You know, what's the thing with Buttergate?

I am going to just bring that up. Paula, Paula Dean years ago was on the food. She was a food network star, got herself into a little bit of trouble there for a while. We haven't heard much out of Paula Dean, but her whole career was built on butter. Yeah. Hot butter and all hot, hot butter and all that's what she used to say instead of hot butter and oil, because she was from the South. It always came out as hot butter and all. I like that. Barefoot Contessa uses a lot of butter too in her dishes.

Queen Ina is not shy to use butter. She uses a lot. I love butter. I'm a butter guy. Have you ever thought about making your own butter?

Julie could teach us. Yeah, Buddy and I made his own butter. He's making all these, cooking up a storm over the pandemic. And he's actually sent me and my friend a text. He's like, guys, check it out. I made my own butter. It's really easy. So I should try to make my own butter. Does he have a family? Does he have a lot of free time on his hands? He does have a family. He cooks for his family. So he's a really good cook, actually. Oh. Adam, I'm just going to put this out here. I have a butter mold. It's a little wooden thing from my great-grandmother.

And if your friend would like that, I'll ask him if he wants your butter. I've got it sitting. But if you'd like my butter mold, I'd be happy to give it to him. If you know what I mean. People have been making all kinds of stuff at home though, during the pandemic. I saw a video the other day, the other day, I mean, four months ago, but that's, that's COVID talk for you. The other day, I mean, a year ago, there was a guy, really clever guy.

How to make rice noodles at home. So it got me. I clicked on there. The steps were so ludicrously complicated. What you had to boil down, get out, add in, do this, pour off. I'm like, oh my God, I would never attempt to make these in a million years. No. There's just things I have no intention of making. I don't mind making my own pizza dough. I will go that far. Sure.

But I am not going to make a seitan roast out of something modified wheat gluten and spices. I mean, I'm going to leave that to the professionals.

and nothing is worse than when you get a super like you get a very very complicated recipe that they position to you at the outset as being oh it'll only take 35 minutes to make i'm looking at you bon appetit and i'm halfway through the recipe and it's like an hour of my life is gone and i'm like i know so i am not making my own rice noodles forget about it so an easy recipe have you seen the it's all over tiktok that feta cheese pasta sauce have you have you seen that

Yes, I have. Yes, I have. So we tried it. Okay. Do tell. Here's my take on it. It is easy. It's a very easy thing to make. And here's my review. It's actually the concoction of feta cheese and tomatoes and olive oil and basil. And we put shallots in there and you bake it. It's totally delicious, but I think it's too rich for a pasta sauce. It's really rich.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the Adam Karsh review of the feta surprise noodle dish. Well, I'll tell you this much, Adam, you've discouraged me from trying that noodle dish. I want nothing to do with it. No, it's very rich. I think it'd make a better dip. Well, here's the thing for you. You can make your own vegan feta with tofu and vinegar. I'm not going to go, but it is so freakishly delicious. In fact, I like it better than feta.

I'm just going to say that. Erin Ireland, shout out to my friend Erin Ireland in Vancouver. You can follow her at Erin Ireland on Instagram. She is unbelievably clever. Lauren Toyota is another one, at Lauren. Oh, yeah. No, she is, what is her Twitter handle? God, she's going to kill me for not knowing this. Anyway, just look at Lauren Toyota. Her handle will come up.

But yeah, there's so many that the how to do it at home. But yeah, the Buttergate thing, when Julie comes in today, you know, only Julie Van Rosendahl would notice that butter was not melting at room temperature the way it should. And only Julie would take...

you know, a lot of time to research why that was happening. I don't think I would have ever noticed that in a bajillion years. I noticed it, but I didn't ever think that it- But I didn't think this was like part of a larger conspiracy. Like I didn't think there was something afoot. I just thought that, you know, my house was colder or I bought,

a cheaper brand of butter this time, or I got like a wonky cow or something like that. I didn't think that it was part of this vast conspiracy. It turns out a lot of people were experiencing the same thing at once. And I partially think that because we're baking, or at least I have been baking so much more at home. And a lot of recipes do call for a specific temperature of the butter that you incorporate into the recipe. I noticed that butter was harder all the time.

And it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't as spreadable. And it, it seemed to me to just not be as creamy. And I wanted like better butter all of a sudden. I just can't even believe that is the last thing that would ever cross my mind. I mean, when I opened my fridge, it's more like I stand there. I actually, when I moved to this house,

I vowed to get a fridge with a glass door so I could see through it because I was always standing with the fridge door open and I did. So now I actually don't have to open the fridge door to stand in front of my fridge to look in to see what I don't have. That's about as far as it goes for me. I'm like, do I have any chips? Like is, is, uh, I don't know. I haven't used butter for years. So

Anyway, I'm just wondering if there's anything that you guys actually would want to learn how to make. Like a specific recipe or like a complicated food item? Well, I mean, something weird. I've always wanted to make ravioli. I did it once and I should have done it again, but it did take me four hours. It took me four hours to make a mushroom ravioli.

kind of a creamy filling ravioli. And I was, my kitchen was a disaster. I had flour in the creases of my arms. Like it was everywhere. - I'd like to learn how to make pasta noodle. I'd like to try that, to try to make spaghetti noodles. - Do you have one of the windy doody? - We don't, we don't. - How can you imagine windy doody?

doesn't Phillips have a pasta maker? I know that's cheating and it doesn't count, but I think Phillips has like, you add your eggs and your whatever and the semolina flour. But what do you do? Do you roll it? Do you roll it out? If you don't have one of those things, I think you have to roll. I've seen people do it without the rolling thing. I'm a jig. You roll it and you feed it into like a cutter. And like, it's, it is a complicated process. And I've, I've done it where we have had friends who, you know, be at a cottage or something. And they think, Oh,

Wouldn't it be fun to make our own pasta? And I'm of the mind where I'm like, no, no, wouldn't we should just go and buy it. And then we have more time to drink. But bag of pasta is so easy. You just buy it. It's 99 cents and you put it in boiling water. So I want to say, I don't like fresh pasta. I don't like it. I always see it in the little refrigerator aisle of supermarkets and

and they have like the fettuccine or whatever. I've bought it a few times. I have been drastically, profoundly disappointed.

When I boil it up because it doesn't get all dented falls, it's too gushy. And no, I think also too, like I get spoiled by the fact that when you live in this, a great food city and Toronto is definitely that, um, and you're downtown and you know, I live a stone's throw from some incredible Italian places. Like we're talking grocery stores, like the Taroni production kitchen, Spockio is like

not far from me. Mattachione, which arguably makes the best bread and pasta pizza in the city is, you know, I can walk there. So that's why I'm like, I am not going to do a better job than this. I'm just going to leave it to the experts. I'm not going to try to make my own beer anytime soon either. These people know what they're doing. Let's make our own beer. No, no interest in making my own alcohol. I will leave that to the LCBO and your own wine.

terrible and don't you offer it to me don't you offer me your homemade wine because I I'm not drinking it no my god it will take the your eyelids off the next day forget it like no well Julie Van Rosendahl is up next thank you Spotify thanks for shining a light on us don't go away you're listening to the Jan Arden podcast with Adam Karsh Caitlin Green and Julie Van Rosendahl is up next hey hey good looking

What you got cooking? How's about cooking something up with me? Welcome back to the Jan Arden Podcast. As promised, you've heard of Watergate. You've heard of, well, you've heard of Watergate. And now I was trying to think of other gates that you might have heard of. You've heard of the Garden Gate. You've heard of the gate to the... Julie Van Rosendahl has cracked...

wide open, a thing that's been going on with butter in dairy for a long time, like a lot of years. And a few weeks ago, Julie, as she does, and she's with me now. Hello, Julie. Hello. Was in her kitchen wondering why her butter was not

She just was really looking longingly at her butter going, why does this butter seem weird? Take it from there, Julie. Oh my gosh. What the hell has been happening? You've been tweeting with Nigella Lawson. You've got the entire world tweeting.

talking about butter and what's happening to it. So take us back and walk us through what Buttergate is. How it all went down? Well, it's something that has been popping up on social media for a while, like a year. Last spring, people started asking me on Twitter, what's going on with butter? And it's something that I noticed, but just like everyone else, I thought it was just me. I didn't think it was a thing. I thought my kitchen was too cold. And so I, as a recipe writer, started rethinking how I would...

say, you know, butter at room temperature, butter softened when you need to beat it for cookie dough or buttercream icing or something. And I was thinking, you know, when I say butter at room temperature, it's not really soft enough at room temperature. And I was teaching all these pie classes and noticing that the butter from the countertop was firm enough to go right into the pastry. It didn't have to come from the fridge. Anyway, so it was something I'd noticed, but other people were noticing it.

people started asking, I was like, I don't know what's up, but it kept kind of coming up. And I noticed it throughout the seasons, you know, clearly wasn't limited to one brand of butter. And so I tweeted about it as one does, you know, I went to social media to sort of gauge the extent of the phenomena. And I posted on February 5th. Now it's very like, who knew it was going to explode like this. Jimmy Fallon joked about it this week.

last week. I don't even know what day it is. I know. I didn't make it onto a weekend update on Saturday Night Live. You will, Julie. There's time. Anyway, so I posted as one does Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I was like, what's up? Do you guys notice something's up the better? I got like hundreds, thousands. I think I got a thousand on Facebook comments. Oh my gosh. And everybody was saying, I thought it was just me. We just had this conversation. We were just talking about this.

So it was clear it was, you know, coast to coast. It wasn't, you know, limited to one brand. It was something was going on. So I kind of dug into it. Sorry, I'm making this a way longer story than I know. Julie, this is your show. We are here for everything Buttergate. It also makes fantastic lip balm, by the way, especially those little pats, you know, that you get at the Tim Hortons drive through. Excellent lip balm. Anyway, so

So I kind of dug into it a few weekends ago. Do you remember the winter vortex? It was like minus a thousand. Yeah. I've lost one of my nipples in my yard. I'm not sure where it is. It's okay. It will be well preserved. It's frozen. Thank you. So I went and bought a whole bunch of butter. You know, I laid them out on the tables. Very scientific process. I touched them on a regular basis.

And then I kind of dug into my theory. So my theory, which I posted also on social media, was that it was a change in the fatty acid profile of the butter itself. Because saturated fats like lard are solid at room temperature, and unsaturated fats like canola oil, olive oil, are liquid at room temperature, it made sense in my head that it was a change in that fatty acid profile that was making the butter more solid at room temperature, right? Yeah.

So what would make that change in the characteristics of the butter? A change in the cow's diet.

So I kind of went down this rabbit hole reading about, you know, ruminant digestion and, and, you know, all this livestock feed. And I got a message from someone on, on Instagram, someone I don't know who said, you know, I've been working on livestock feed for a decade. The pandemic has caused some supply chain disruptions, especially overseas imports like molasses and palm fats. And I was like, Oh, wait a minute. Palm fats, palm fats are, are common in our food system and,

especially in processed food, but very high in saturated fat, palm oil, palm kernel oil, you know, palm byproducts. And so I did some digging, found that they are in fact a common livestock feed and marketed specifically to dairy cows, dairy, well, not to the cows themselves because cows can't read, but the farmers to the dairy farmers to boost output and to boost the butterfat content in the resulting milk.

So then I went looking for research and there is a lot of research out there that shows the correlation between the use of these, these fat supplements, these palm fat based supplements and the fatty acid profile, the palmitic acid transfer. It was very sciencey. I got right into it. I felt very Nancy Drew about it all in the resulting milk, which would change the texture of the resulting butter. So it's showing up in butter. Can I interject for one second? Please do.

Is palm oil and palm trees and the taking down of palm trees a catastrophe globally? Yes, that's one of the main reasons people avoid it. So not only is dairy already in trouble as far as, let's say, the optics on dairy right now, just the humaneness of it, the veal industry offshoot of it. So now you're telling me that

Our butter, and correct me if I'm wrong, is softer at room temperature when the cattle, when the dairy cows have the palm oil products to eat in their diets. So without it, the butter was getting harder. The opposite of what you're saying. So when they're getting these palm supplements, it's increasing the saturated fat content of the resulting milk and the butter, and that's making it more firm at room temperature.

And they're, they're giving it to the cows because they want more milk coming out of their bodies. Well, it boosts. Yeah. It boosts output, but it also boosts the butter fat. And right now consumers want fat. So 10, 15 years ago, and, and these supplements are not new. They've been used in the dairy industry for about 20 years, but they're,

they're becoming increasingly common. The ration size has gone up and the researchers that I spoke with saw a correlation over about 300 grams per head per day. And the livestock companies, the livestock feed companies are suggesting 400 to 900 grams per day. So the, the rations have gone up and,

And it's become more of a common tool because farmers are trying to meet their quotas, right? They need to meet a certain quota for butter. Consumers want butter. 10, 15 years ago, we wanted fluid milk. We want a protein and people were buying margarine. It's super interesting when you really dig into the layers. And so people weren't using it as much, but now it's becoming more common. The rations are increasing and that's what's ultimately...

in theory, but we know what's happening and we know there's a correlation between the palmitic acid and the texture of the butter. What did Jimmy Fallon say?

Oh, he made a joke about Canadian problems. What did he say? I can't even remember now. Canadian problems. Hey, honey, is this mustard more mustardy? Like pandemic problems. But it's been everywhere. It was number one on the BBC for over 24 hours. It was in the New York Times. It was in The Guardian. It was in... The Times of London called me on Friday morning. I did Radio Melbourne. It's been...

It has completely exploded. There are these political cartoons about Canadian butter being firm. Like it's just, I think people, part of the reason

Partly we're tired. There's just relieved that it wasn't another pandemic story. But I did notice this with butter because I started baking at home more during lockdown. And I did notice that my room temperature butter, when I would spread it on toast, had a harder consistency and I just didn't find it. I don't know if this is one of the side effects of it or not. You can probably tell me now because you're the expert.

is that somehow it seemed like it was less creamy, if that's a thing. It seemed more on the clear oil side of things than it did on the creamy dairy side of things. And I found myself looking for different brands of butter because I thought it was one brand specific issue. And it's weird. I was like, who even cares as much about butter? Well, you do if you're baking a ton of stuff.

people care. This is all we have. They're messing with it. Don't mess with my butter and my cheese. And it turns out it's affecting the texture of cheese as well, but it was more noticeable as we started baking more, right? Everyone's at home, everyone's cooking, everyone's baking and paying attention. And then there was another connection, pandemic connection, but I think we're running out of time. So I'll get into that next.

riveted by this and I mean that seriously I've been really so excited to talk to you about you're listening to the Jan Arden podcast we were with butter expert Julie Van Rosendahl who's she's just she's an expert in food don't go away I want to talk to her about Nigella Lawson when we come back

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Yes, butter it. They call me Mellow Yellow. Welcome back to the Jan Arden Podcast. My special guest, Julie Van Rosendahl. Buttergate. It's going around the world. The quality, is it quality of butter maybe that's been affected by this?

Or is it just the texture? But are the, so all these comments you're getting, what is the general kind of consensus? Are they mad? Are they like, has anyone said to you, why is there fricking palm oil in, why are they feeding palm, whatever products, dairy cows? Why are they feeding them that? Like, do we really need to add insult to injury and have more palm oil? That's the thing that we're all trying to avoid. We don't want palm oil.

Like when I see palm oil, I won't buy it. If it's something even benign, a candy or a cereal or a soup, or if I read the ingredients all the time now, I started doing that like a few years ago when I, when I went plant-based, but like, we don't want palm oil. Why do we want it in our butter?

Well, and that's the thing. Usually, typically, you can look on the label and read in the ingredients and see if there are palm products in the ingredients. But in this case, when it's actually in the feed that's going into the cow and changing what's coming out of the cow, you can't see it. They don't have to put it. So I get the sense that industry is kind of scrambling to communicate with consumers whether or not

has been a factor in the process. And already there's been huge response from industry and the Quebec dairy farmers took a stand against the use of these supplements supported by AgriPure, PEI, Dairy Farmers, Dairy Farmers of Canada released a statement this week. So they're not using it?

Well, they're saying they're asking the farmers not to not to use them or to look for alternatives. So the dairy farms of Canada asked that that dairy farmers look for alternatives. But the nutritionists, the dairy nutritionists that I spoke with, livestock nutritionists said there isn't really a replacement. There isn't anything that behaves the same way.

as a supplement, as palm fat. People are saying, why not canola oil? Why not a Canadian grown oil? But those high omega-3 oils actually tend to suppress the butterfat production, has the opposite effect. So there isn't really anything it seems to replace them, but they're not necessary for cow's health. One of the nutritionists too, actually, that I spoke with said, you know, they could stop using them tomorrow and the cows would be fine.

But we would need 5% more cows about in Canada to meet the quota to make the same amount of butter and milk. So the other interesting part, and I kind of alluded to this, the pandemic factor, because the pandemic affects every story right now.

And last spring, so everyone was noticing because we're baking more. But last spring, there was a larger than usual cull of dairy cows. So in a typical year, this is something I found as I was researching, over 200,000 dairy cows are culled each year for various reasons. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

200,000. Over. Dairy cows are called. And where do they go? What happens to them? They go to the beef industry. People are eating the ones they're calling? Yeah. People, listen up here. You are eating a called dairy cow on occasion.

Okay, keep going. So last spring, there was a larger than usual call because there is such a dramatic shift in consumer demand. All the restaurants closed, all the schools closed, a lot of institutions closed. So there is this huge shift, a huge drop in food service demand for dairy products. And

is followed by a surge in retail demand for dairy products. All the packaging companies couldn't keep up because they were making more packages with fewer people because of COVID protocols. So because of this crazy shift in demand, there was larger than usual cull. And I tried to find out from the CDC how many more. They didn't have stats on it yet, but they confirmed that it was larger than usual. Last

Last spring. So what we had was a situation where this huge jumping consumer demand for butter, especially, and, and farmers trying to meet their quotas with a smaller population of cows, right? With fewer cows. So palm supplements are a tool to, you know, boost the output. And you can't tell me that the plant-based revolution with plant-based milks, you know, isn't affecting the bottom line of this as well.

There's so many new products going out. When I go to Safeway now, when I go to Costco, when I go to Loblaws, whatever, they used to have oat milk, soy milk, almond milk in a little teeny section. You'd have to wander through the store and you'd find your stuff. And now it's beside the dairy. And it is a big, there's two, three refrigerators full of

it's, it's almost comparable to what's lined up with dairy. Yeah. Like it's happening. I mean, it's changing the look of it. So I know they have a lot of things. I mean, they must be really scrambling right now. They can't even afford one more weird thing to go on because there's such a thing happening in the industry as a whole, but I don't know. I still can't get over the 200,000 cows.

Yeah. Called. Yeah. But I mean, there, there are way more options when it comes to fluid milk, right? So you're right. There probably is an impact on the fluid milk part of the dairy industry with people buying more cashew milk and oat milk and other, other milks. Yep. That's yeah. That's interesting. I can look into that. Tell me, I don't want to get all gloom and doom. I mean, yeah.

There, there are so many interesting parts of this story. Like I really don't even know where to go because we don't have a lot of time. I want to talk about Nigella Lawson. I want to talk about what has been going on. You guys have been going back and forth on Twitter. So your first twit tweet, your first tweet, I'll tell you who my first tweet was. And it was Caitlin green. No, no. I see. What, what's tell me what happened there?

I said, oh, if this doesn't go that, so Nigella, that was three weeks ago when I first said what's going on with butter and then my theories. And I kind of engaged, you know, my, my social media friends to help kind of solve this mystery, right. By, you know, talking about it. Nigella jumped in this week after the times of London interviewed me. So I tweeted, I talked to the times of London about butter this morning. Do you think Nigella will see it? And, and she said, get this.

I will look out for it. Huh? But then the next day, so Saturday, Sunday on the weekend, she got back to me on Twitter. She said, I did. And thank you for your sterling work on behalf of butter. But you have to say it in her, you got to think of it in her accent.

Thank you. I don't even want to try. You're sterling. Sterling. Julie, thank you for your sterling work in butter. You nailed it. It's absolutely. Sterling work. Your sterling work in butter was absolutely glorious. Sterling. And I was like, you know, I wondered if maybe she was frustrated too having to put it in the micro, what did she say? Microwave? The micro. The micro. The micro.

Do you remember that? The micro-wave, she called it. I love her. I think she was kidding. Oh, no, I know she was kidding. Oh, I thought she was kidding. I thought she was saying it like micro-wave, like you say, you know, veluvelage or I don't know, other things. The micro-wave. So I wanted to, I should have asked her if she finds it frustrating to put her butter in the micro-wave. Well, it's really great that you guys were going back and forth. And it just goes to show you how far reaching this story was. Yeah.

And that's something that, you know, we take for granted what is on our plates. We take for granted, you know, we think that there's a status quo that things just remain the same. And obviously you were intuitive enough and had the foresight to go, I'm going to dig a little bit here and see what's going on because you just didn't want to leave well enough alone.

I can't, I can't do it. I, you know, I just, I wanted to solve that mystery, but it's happening in other countries as well. Palm products are not only in livestock feed in Canada. And in fact, here's something interesting. New Zealand is the world's number one exporter of dairy.

They import a lot of their livestock feed because they have limited capacity to grow on an island. And the number one by far, and they're by far the largest exporter of dairy, but by far the largest livestock feed that they import is called PKE, palm kernel expeller or extractor expeller. PKE is the crushed kernel leftover after the palm kernel oil is extracted. So you get this husk that's leftover and it's common in livestock feed. So delicious.

Doesn't it sound tasty? So it's mostly used for dairy cows in New Zealand. Number one imported livestock feed, mostly used for dairy cows. So that's a big part of that. You've got 30 seconds to wrap this up. What are you going to do? I don't even know. I don't even know. Where do we go from here? Grass-fed butters can't use any... People always ask me, how do I know? But the interesting thing is people are so focused on butter, but not thinking of...

the milk and the cream and the other stuff. Julie Van Rosendahl, thank you so much for Buttergate. You can go on to iHeartRadio to listen to other Canadian podcasts. Did you know that? And you will not be disappointed. Once again, we just want to thank our Spotify partners. They've been shining a little light on us the month of March. And if you're a new Spotify listener, welcome along. So yeah, hit that subscribe button and then you don't have to look for us anymore. Julie,

Will you come back and see us? It's been too long. And we haven't talked in so long. And now I'm really getting the wrap-up sign. Screw you! The wrap-up fingers. Adam Karsh, Caitlin Green, and of course the wonderful, brilliant Julie Van Rosendahl. Grass-fed butter. And, you know, a plant-based butter. You can avoid all of these problems. Toot-a-loo-doo. ♪

This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.