Soap Box: You butter believe it...

A few weeks ago I was on a hot search for butter. Yeah, I said it. Butter. Look, readers, butter is not the horrible enemy you think it is. Let me tell you what is - veggie oiled based faux butter is your worst enemy. That Fabio-endorsed crap with the apropo title is your worst enemy. Let me tell you why.

A year ago, a co-worker hipped me to a little food logic that has been sticking with me through this whole rebuilding process. If a product has more than 5 ingredients, none of which you can pronounce without a science book, then this should not go into your body. Wow! Simple and yet it makes a whole lot of freaking sense.

So, fast forward to the Wal-mart's butter section where we join our heroine (yours truly) in a search for real butter. People, I spent 10 minutes reading the back of every butter tub and every one I picked up sickened me to no end. I picked up every variety of butter brand there could be (the Blue Bonnet, Smart Butter, I can't Believe it's not Butter, Wal-mart 'Good Sense'). First off, practically all those butters had 100 calories per 1 tablespoon! One hundred freaking calories! And these were the "health conscious" ones. Seriously! Oh, get this, every single one of those I picked up was a veggie-oil based spread with stuff like homegenous-something something for chemicals.

What the eph am I eating, Butter Bureaucrats?! Laymen terms, puhleeze! The oleo one really freaked me out, because nothing goes better with your bran muffin than crapping your pants. There's a WARNING LABEL, people! A WARNING LABEL on a FOOD PRODUCT! Something is wrong with that.

However, it all makes sense now. Have you ever left butter out of the fridge? Do you ever get around to studying the melted mess? It has an oil ring on the butter dish. I mean leave it by the oven and you got the Exxon Valdez spill on your kitchen counter. Yowsers! Oh, and by the way, real butter is made from cream, which means you can't leave it out for too long or it spoils (learned that the hard way). Also, if you can spread it easy right out the fridge, you have an imposter. Real butter is not easy to spread out the fridge unless you let it sit for a minute or two.

So, what did our heroine do? I actually came up on a tub of Land o' Lakes Unsalted Sweet Cream butter. Already jaded by the last 10 tubs of butter (one of them being a package of LOL SPREADABLE butter), I had lost all kinds of hope, but to my immediate surprise the tub of sweet cream fulfilled my want. Get this, all the ingredients on that back of the tub were sweet cream, milk and natural flavoring. Really?? Oh, wait, I compared it to the LOL Spreadable butter, which listed Canola Oil as an ingredient. So, what was the calorie count on the lovely spread of the Unsalted Sweet Cream, it was only 50 calories per 1 tablespoon. FIDDY, people!

Why, in a sea of "healthy" butters, did I have to turn to an original butter source for the fewer calories? And it cost me two dollars cheaper than those other liars! This is just more proof that just because Corp U-S-A has a cracker jack marketing team throwing the words "healthy", "low-fat", "reduced calorie" on ev-very-thang we eat, doesn't mean it's good for ya. This is just another lesson I've been learning as I learn to read labels.

Seriously, people. I mean you can look at an apple and know what it is and what's in it. Packaging is food camoflage that we have to strip down and figure out. Jim Gaffigan made a great joke about packaging, where he described a great meal of "savory chunks of beef in a savory sauce" and turns out it was dog food. He ends the bit with, "Thank God for packaging." Well, sometimes we have to go one step further and read the back of the label to see what the hell makes up some of this stuff.

Foods got to be useful, not hindering. I hope y'all have a butter moment in your local grocery store. Pray for me, y'all!