GEORGE F.W. HAENLEIN
Extension Dairy Specialist
University of Delaware
NEWARK, Del. —Just as Cin
derella has been much maligned,
butter hasn’t fated much better the
last three decades.
There was margarine, promoted
by plant oil processors and other
big-money interests. And margar
ine was cheaper, so who could
resist?
Then there was the medical
research news on heart-disease
risks. Who wanted to ignore that?
Only the gourmets and great
chefs resisted the trend toward
margarine, as well as a few dyed
in-the-wool traditionalists who
remembered the wonderful fra
grance and finer tastes butter lent
to their mothers’ home cooking.
No butter-substitute could ever
match the taste of foods cooked
and baked with the real thing, or
the satisfying flavor of bread
spread with butter.
The worldwide dairy industry
was so seriously affected by this
direction away from butter that the
popular Guernseys, Jerseys and
Milking Shorthorns, with their
high butterfat contents in milk,
were supplanted to near extinc
tion.
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The replacement cows were
mostly Holstein-Friesians, whose
milk has low butterfat contents.
In stores, whole milk (with at
least 3.5 percent fat contents) fell
horn grace, giving way to skim
milk, 1 percent—now the biggest
seller and 2 percent. The result
was a butter surplus, which in Eur-
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Butter Is Dairy Industry’s Cinderella
ope they termed “the butter
mountain.”
Politicians tried desperately to
devise new ways of getting rid of
this suddenly unwanted member
of the dairy family. Then nobody
called butter Cinderella. Instead,
butter was termed a liability, forc
ing many dairy farmers to lose
ground financially and eventually
quit.
I remember a story about a
Holstein farmer and a Jersey farm
er in the days before the butter
glut disaster.
The Holstein advocate teased
the Jersey proponent: “When you
milk Jersey milk into a can con
taining a quarter at the bottom,
your milk barely coven it!”
To which the Jersey farmer
replied: “Yeah, but when I milk
your Holstein milk into that can, I
still can see the quarter, even
when the can is full. And that’s
why on my Jersey farm I always
keep one Holstein cow. I milk her
last so that my milking pipeline is
rinsed out!”
When Holsteins took over the
American dairy industry market
and the butter mountain grew big
ger, that story became bittersweet
But like with so many unjustly
maligned things, the truth will sur
face eventually, and the liabilities
will turn into assets.
A few years ago I stumbled
onto some little-known medical
research that dealt with a part of
butterfat that no one had paid
much attention to.
All the health-risk-type news on
butter was concerned with the
V.'-v
saturated long-chain fatty acids,
ignoring the fact that butter is
made up of many other types of
fatty acids and in varying propor
tions, which can change greatly as
a result of different types of feed
fed to cows, goats, sheep and other
milking animals.
Specifically, ruminant milk
contains at least one-quarter to
one-half of other fatty acids thatf
the saturated long-chain type,
which is the one that receives bad
press.
Most of these other fatty acids
are of the short- and medium
chain type, which in human nutri
tion and metabolism behave quite
differently from the long-chain
type. They do not add to fat depo
sits in the belly and hips; instead,
they are used as readily available
energy.
In addition, these short- and
medium-chain fatty acids have the
remarkable ability not only to
lower blood serum cholesterol,
but to inhibit cholesterol
deposition.
According to published medical
research literature, the short- and
medium-chain fatty acids also
have been successful as medical
treatments for patients (especially
infants and young children) suf
fering from various digestive
malabsorption disorders.
Thus, butter should actually be
called one of the good guys and
not lumped together in the news
with the bad-guy fats the satur
ated long-chain types.
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tains greater amounts of the Shetl
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The medical applications of this
advance are far-reaching.
The Dairy Research Center in
Madison, with the support of the
National Dairy Board, is spear
heading work on fractionation of
milk components, especially but
ter, to develop new commercial
products, thanks to the new tech
nology of fractionation of milk. In
fact, he considers fractionation the
“greatest invention since butter
and cheese.”
The burnishing of butter’s
brighter image could be the dairy
industry’s Cinderella story of the
’9os. And dairy farmers, who have
always worked long, hard hours
with (heir milking animals, may
benefit from butter’s recovering
prospects. Then they. too. can
look forward to a happy ending of
their own a change for the bet
ter financially.
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duce butter with more or less of
those good guys, depending on
how you feed diem.
And, finally, other people arc
beginning to notice this informa
tion, too. According to Dr. R.
Bishop, the new head of the Dairy
Research Center at Madison,
Wis., milk is becoming very valu
able, not just as a traditional drink
and precursor of yogurt and
cheeses, but as a resource of other
interesting components.
Some proteins isolated from
milk were sold recently to a Japan
ese cosmetic industry for $3,000
per pound!
But the big news comes from
the components of milk making
up the much-slandered butter.
Some butter fractions are
replacing cocoa fat in chocolate,
giving it better aging qualities and
appearance. This use gives butter
a SO percent profit margin!
New Zealand apparently is way
ahead of the United States in
marketing soft butter, the demand
9