"Buttergate" - just a storm in a butter dish?

For weeks now, articles have been telling me that the Canadian dairy industry has been stiffing me, messing with my sacred butter. I didn't get too upset: I don't use much butter, certainly not spread on bread, and only occasionally in cooking, such as for making a sauce, in which case what I am using is melted butter.

So, should I care that butter is not as soft as it used to be? Most of the complaints are coming from chefs and foodies, anecdotal nit-picking from people with whom I have little in common. There is not a groundswell of outrage from scientists. Indeed, it is not even proven definitively that butter has in fact changed substantially. But, since the pandemic, we are all foodies now, no?

So, it's interesting that the first article I have read on the subject by people you might describe as scientists pours a good dose of cold water on the foodies' complaints. For one thing, there have been no actual scientific studies done to show that Canadian dairy farmers are in fact using more palm oil or palmitic acid (two quite different things that are often conflated in the non-scientific literature) in cattle feed recently. One or the other has been used for many years, if not decades.

Also, the hardness of butter can be affected by a whole host of other factors in addition to feed. Plus, anyway, an old study showed that butter hardness can differ by a factor of two depending merely on the normal seasonal variation in cow's feed.

Another good article explains that palm oil supplements have been used in dairy farming for at least twenty years in Canada, the USA, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. Palm oil is rich in palmitic acid, which provides cows with energy during lactation, thus helping to increase milk production without negatively affecting the cows' health. And unfortunately there do not seem to be any obvious alternatives (other vegetable oils like soy and canola tend to inhibit the cows' ability to digest fibre).

As for the whole issue of the use of palm oil in commercial dairy farming, there are probably more fertile areas for protest from the anti-palm oil lobby. Palm oil is in any number of ingredients we use every day (WWF estimates half of all packaged products on supermarket shelves, from shampoos and soaps to pizzas and cookies, although that metric sounds a little excessive); it would be perverse to complain about butter in particular. I'm not trying to condone the rape and pillage of pristine rainforest for palm oil plantations (this IS a problem, although it does have some redeeming features, such as its land use efficiency, its relatively low need for fertilizers, and of course its job production in developing countries with few economic prospects ). I'm just looking for a little perspective.