Following on from the last post about milk, which also provides food for thought for buying other dairy produce, I thought it was worth following up with a quick peek at spreads.
In the red corner is butter. In the blue margarine.
Which should you be spreading on your toast and why?
For a few years, ever since someone told me that margarine’s natural colour is black and that it has to be bleached white and then dyed yellow in order to make it look acceptable, I’ve eaten butter. This tale convinced me that whatever health problems might be associated with butter, they’re probably not nearly as bad as eating something that’s made like margarine is.
So I’ve looked into it. I still don’t really know if margarine really starts off black. But it does appear that my gut response based on not much other than urban myth was about right.
And here’s why.
From an environmental point of view margarine is worse than butter. A lot of spreads are made from palm oil, often disguised as “vegetable oil”. Unbeknown to most of us, it’s also in about 10% of products you’ll find in your local supermarket. It’s in biscuits, ice cream and pastry. As well as soup, soap, toothpaste, shampoo and lipstick. It’s even boot polish. It’s everywhere.
The production of palm oil is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. In order to meet the massive demand for it, huge tracks of rain forest are being destroyed to make way for plantations from which to harvest it. Malaysia and Indionisia who between them produce 80% of the 30 million tonnes of palm oil the world now consumes every year, have created plantations that cover an area the size of England. Destroying rain forest is bad news as means there are less trees to soak up all the CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere. CO2 is also released from the peat bogs that rain forest clearance creates.
Not only do many spreads include palm oil, but the process of making margarine is also very energy intensive. It’s also highly industrialised and dominated by multinationals like Unilever (manufactures of Flora) who have been frequently criticised for their environmental record. Butter in contrast, tends to be produced by much smaller companies and produced in the UK from locally produced milk.
And then there’s what else there is in margarine.
To make it, you bubble hydrogen through cheap vegetable oil to turn it into solid fat. Then you mix it with water. The trouble is oil and water don’t mix. So you need to add some chemicals to make it mix. Things like lecithin or monoglycerine. Sounds nice eh?
Because the whole chemical process ends up removing much of the nutrition that was in the oil to start with, artifical flavourings and vitamins are added. Preservatives are put in so that it doesn’t go off quickly. And then colours are added in order to make it look like food. Yum.
Next time you pick up a tub of margarine, have a look at the ingredients list. It will almost certainly be lengthy. And it will contain a number of things that would sound more at home in a science lab rather than in something that you spread on your toast.
In contrast butter contains milk.
Just milk.
Perhaps some salt.
But pretty much, just milk.
From a health point of view, some new research suggests that, in moderation, some of the fats found in dairy products actually promote health rather than damage it.
Conversely, there’s also some recent research that suggests chemically hardened vegetable fats (margarine) may in fact contain something called trans-fats which are every bit as bad as the saturated fat found in butter. Basically, we shouldn’t eat loads of any hard fat.
In terms of what brands to buy, Ethical Consumer magazine recommends Biona, Yeo Valley Organic and Country Life butter.
If you still want to go for marg, then it recommends Biona and Suma. Biona use palm oil from a certified sustainable source. They give Bertolli, Stork and I Can’t Believe It’s Not butter pretty much the lowest score they ever give and the market leader Flora score even worse and props up the league table. Don’t buy Flora.
Personally, I’m going to stick to butter. I’d rather wager my health with something that’s come out of an animal rather than a highly industrial process.
We’ve also recently just bought a butter dish. It’s satisfyingly retro and means that we buy the butter in paper rather than in the big plastic tub that ends up in landfill.
So what will it be? Butter or chemically hardened rain-forest-destroying vegetable fat? I know which I prefer.
I vote for butter. I also like sunflower oil and olive oil. I despise palm oil. I always read the ingredients on packaging. Whenever I see ‘vegetable oil’ I’m immediately sceptical because I suspect palm oil is in there and the manufacturers want to glaze over the facts.
Butter, Butter, Butter! And when we get a cream separater (someday- they are expensive) I’ll be making our own butter from the lovely goat’s milk we get from our girls.
Same goes for all those store bought biscuits, pastries and ice cream. Make ’em fresh when ever you can. Then you don’t have to guess at the bizarre chemical concoctions hidden within.
Best Wishes & Enjoy the Butter!
This had made us start buying butter.. well kind of.
We’ve gone to Lurpak Spreadable.. gradually weaning ourselves off of Utterly Whatsitnot on to the real stuff.
Seems these spreadable ones use a percentage of vegetable oil to lube them up. Sorry, but I prefer to have spread fairly even over my bread – but butter just rips it up. And no, we can’t leave it out, the cat would have a field day – he hates marg and has been moaning about palm oil I suspect for some months to us now.
re the spreadability – if you get a nice butter dish and keep it in the cupboard, not the fridge, it is easily spreadable, keeps for ages and looks cool too, as Matt says. The French have this sussed, with the butter bell (Cloche a Beurre): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_butter_dish
i might not have imagined this was interesting quite a few years in the past yet somehow it’s interesting exactly how age varies the manner in which you see varying creative ideas, thanks with regard to the piece of writing it really is good to start reading some thing sensible occasionally instead of the ordinary nonsense mascarading as a blog on the web, i’m off to have fun with a few hands of facebook poker, adios for now
I’ve just returned to butter because of all the nasty stuff in margarine and ‘olive oil’ spreads. A butter dish is actually on my shopping list to buy tomorrow ;-p
So I changed the family over to butter a month or so ago. I’m trying to remove as many chemicals as possible from our lives. However I love the taste of butter and by virtue its harder consistency tend to spread and eat too much of it. I would like to go back to lurpak spreadable but only if it really is just butter, oil and salt. Does anyone have any information on lurpak? Thanks