Trouble just south of the Arctic Circle…
The soaring popularity of a fat-rich fad diet has depleted stocks of butter in Norway creating a looming Christmas culinary crisis. Norwegians have eaten up the country’s entire stockpile of butter, partly as the result of a “low-carb” diet sweeping the Nordic nation which emphasizes a higher intake of fats.
“Sales all of a sudden just soared, 20 percent in October then 30 percent in November,” said Lars Galtung, the head of communications at TINE, the country’s biggest farmer-owned cooperative.
A wet summer which reduced the quality of animal feed and cut milk output by 25 million litres had already limited supplies and the shortage has led some pundits to suggest the world’s eighth-largest oil exporter offer some of its plentiful fuel supply in exchange for butter…
Ironically, just across the narrow channel that separates the two countries, Denmark– the region’s dairy powerhouse– is positively swimming in butter. But as Norway demurred on the EU, painfully high import duties keep Danish butter out of reach… at least for now: Butter is now selling on Norway’s top auction website, with a 250-gram piece starting at around $13 (8.28 pounds), roughly four times its normal price. And as Galtung notes, “Norwegians are not afraid of natural fats, they love their butter and cream.”
Don’t we all…
As we spread it thin, we might spare a thought for a man who would have been horrified by the Norwegian’s flight from carbs to calories– physician and health-food pioneer John Harvey Kellogg, who died on this date in 1943, aged 91. For 62 years before his death, Kellogg operated a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan that was run along holistic lines: a vegetarian, he advocated low calorie diets and developed peanut butter, granola, and toasted cereals; he warned that smoking caused lung cancer decades before this link was studied; and he was an early advocate of exercise. For all that, he is surely best remembered, for having developed corn flakes (with his brother Will, who went on to sweeten and commercialize them).
