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The Current Transcript for August 23, 2017

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE 1: We're talking about war. I say every war, including thermonuclear, war must have a winner and a loser. Which would you rather be?

VOICE 2: In a nuclear war everyone loses. War it isn't what it used to be.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's a scene from the 1964 Cold War thriller Fail-Safe. Thermonuclear war seemed very close when that film came out. Suddenly it seems close again with North Korea threatening a merciless strike on the United States, and President Donald Trump warning of fire and fury, and an emergency meeting yesterday on Parliament Hill warned about missiles raining down on us here in Canada as well. As the crisis on the Korean peninsula heats up, we take you to Guam where the war of words between North Korea and the United States is making this island very very nervous. That's coming up, and then, one of my favorite things in the whole wide world: Butter.

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I do really love a great pie. You know, a tender flaky Buttery crust, but I can't eat pie everyday [laughs], but I can eat bread and butter every day.

MG: Delicious. Yes. But also with a rich back story. Later on we dig into the sweet and salty history of butter. But first, Guam and the bomb. I am Matt Galloway. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Without being tested, we don't know U.S. ballistic missile defence works: historian

Guests: Anthony Ramirez, Garrett Graff

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[Sound: Warplanes]

VOICE 1:U.S. bombers based in Guam are on standby as the region braces for Kim Jong Un's reaction to annual military drills between America and Kim's enemy, South Korea, exercises which will be viewed as provocative.

VOICE 2: If there is a miscalculation it could lead to. Catastrophe.

MG: That was Sky News last week. The last voice you heard warning of catastrophe was the governor of Guam. Eddie Calvo it has been a pretty nervous time for residents of Guam. Earlier this month, North Korean President Kim Jong Un had threatened to fire missiles near the island in retaliation for tough talk coming from the Trump White House. And now with war games on the Korean Peninsula in full swing, tensions are once again going up to give us a sense of what life is like in Guam. I am joined by Tony Ramirez. He is a historian based in Hagatna, Guam which is where we have reached him. Hello.

TONY RAMIREZ: Good morning, Canada, half a day from Guam.

MG: How did people in Guam react when they heard about the threats by North Korea to fire missiles that would land near your island?

TONY RAMIREZ: So what my family did was we gather together. We discussed the situation seriously and we discuss about what would happen if it did occur. Where we will be, as a family, as a unit? Because here in Guam we are an extended family system, so we are like neighbors to each other. And so we're one house. My sister's house would be the meeting point for some members of my family and we discussed that. And then because we are a generation of the post World War Two, we have heard first hand accounts of what happened in the case of my parents when World War Two occurred here in Guam. And I am referring to food provision water provision and no that can be prepared to meet any challenges, if it should occur.

MG: How seriously were people taking the threat?

TONY RAMIREZ: Well, with my family we take it very seriously because with our own situation, here in Guam, we have no decision making. We don't decide. And we have to take these actions as they are occurring within the two countries, that is the United States and with North Korea. Of course Guam is under the United States. Guam is four hours away from the International Date Line and it is the only American soil in this part of the world that belong to the United States. So we are at the tip, or we are only within about 15 hundred miles from all these Asian countries, the continent of Asia. That includes Japan, North Korea ,South Korea, mainland China. And we're also almost equal distance to Australia. So we understand the situation too well here in Guam, simply because of the history of the island.

MG: How do people feel about that, about being a player in a situation that you have no control over?

TONY RAMIREZ: Well, to me personally, you are right, and I think to my family, it was very agonizing because you're dealing with people lives. This is my family that would suffer the consequences of what's going on between the two nations.

MG: So these threats continue. And the military exercises are underway, as we mentioned, on the Korean Peninsula. In the midst of all of this, and with this cloud hanging over your island, what is your government telling people to do if these missiles land off the coast of Guam?

TONY RAMIREZ: They came out with [unintelligible]. The information I have here are just basically from the media. But, like I said, the tomorrows are too familiar with situations like this. There was one mother just out of here and [unintelligible] question. She's a friend of mine, but she is much younger than me. I just asked her I said: “What do you think about what's going on between North Korea and the United States?” And she simply said [unintelligible]. You know our parents went through this. Our grandparents went through that, but she the mother now. And so she told me exactly what my sister started doing. The gathering of non-perishable food, water and all that, for you know if anything should happen or if anything should escalate.

MG: I appreciate you joining us today. Tony Ramirez, thank you.

TONY RAMIREZ: Thank you so much, Sir, and good morning Canada.

MG: Tony Ramirez is a historian based in Hagatna, Guam. It isn't just Guam that worries about the nuclear threat posed by North Korea. Yesterday opposition parties in Ottawa called for an emergency meeting of the House of Commons defense committee to discuss the North Korean threat and whether the country should rejoin the US ballistic missile defense system, something the Liberal Government has agreed to do before Parliament resumes in mid-September. All of this sounds like echoes from the chilliest moments of the Cold War. Garrett Graff, has studied that time when nuclear war haunted the daily lives of people around the world. He is the author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of us Die. And he is in Colchester, Vermont. Garrett Graff, hello.

GARRETT GRAFF: Good morning.

MG: A thought for the people in Guam, should they start practicing duck and cover again, given the threats that that seem to be swirling around them right now?

GARRETT GRAFF: Yes. I mean one of the really fascinating aspects of this history, as we watch it all as you say come roaring back in the course of this last year, both the nuclear threats as well as the tensions with Russia, is that we're not really that much further along than we were in the 1950s when we were teaching schoolchildren to duck and cover in elementary school drills, and Bert the Turtle was going around trying to encourage people to be prepared with their backyard fallout shelters. I mean the advice that Guam is giving its residents, that Hawaii is giving its residents is effectively the same information that the U.S. government was handing out in the Eisenhower years.

MG: What about here in Canada? I mean, as you heard, there's a debate in Ottawa underway about Canada joining the U.S. ballistic missile defense system. What do we know about that system and how well it would work if war were to kick off?

GARRETT GRAFF: Well, the challenge of the ballistic missile defense system is there is probably no military system in the world that a government has spent more money on, with less knowledge of whether it would ever actually work, than ballistic missile defense. It's something that dates back really to the 1960s. Almost every presidential administration in the United States has tried to push it forward, Ronald Reagan most famously with his Star Wars initiative in the 1980s. But George W. Bush brought it back in an early 2000s. In some ways it's a system that, if it works which we don't know whether it would, it would actually be much better suited to face something like a North Korean threat than it ever would have been the Soviet Union or Russian threat, because you're talking about a much smaller number of nuclear missiles. You know maybe it's just a half dozen or even fewer than a ballistic missile defense system might be able to intercept. But we don't know. We've never tested it. And we hope never to have to test it in real life.

MG: Your book is about what happens when the bombs land and the idea of continuity of government. What does that mean, continuity of government in the United States?

GARRETT GRAFF: So, continuity of government was a series of plans developed during the Cold War that are still very much in force today. They deal with both how you would respond to a nuclear attack in the minutes and hours of it unfolding? Who would be in charge? How the missiles would get launched? You know, who would get evacuated? Where they would go? And then also the much broader set of plans about how the government would try to begin rebuilding? And so in the United States these plans included that the post office was the agency that was going to be in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive in the United States. The National Park Service, your friendly park rangers, were actually the people who are going to run the refugee camps because the thinking was that the national parks would be largely untouched by nuclear war and would be a safe haven, for people fleeing the devastated cities, and all of the things about how you would begin to try to rebuild normal society. And you know these plans were incredibly detailed. I mean the internal revenue service in the United States had a whole set of plans about how the U.S. government would levy taxes on nuclear did damage property because not even nuclear war stops the need for taxes. You had, you know, the title of the book, Raven Rock, that refers to the largest bunker in the United States. This mountain bunker in Pennsylvania near the presidential retreat of Camp David that still operates today still runs 24 hours a day 365 days a year. And it could hold up to 5000 senior government officials, during a nuclear attack, in what really amounts to a small city deep inside Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania.

MG: I mean and it's not just the United States that has plans. There are Canadian plans for sort of continuity of government that also include this public broadcaster.

GARRETT GRAFF: Absolutely. Matt, you don't have to tell me whether you have one of the special evacuation passes to be whisked by helicopter to the bunkers.

MG: I couldn't tell that, no.

GARRETT GRAFF: [Chuckles] But Canada was very closely related, is very closely related, to these plans in the United States today, particularly with NORAD - the North American Air Defense Command - that is a joint Canadian U.S. military operation headquartered at the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, which some of the listeners may be familiar with from the Matthew Broderick movie, War Games, in 1983. But hat that bunker, very much like Raven Rock, would house thousands of military personnel, many of them Canadian. And then Canada had its own set of bunkers, including the Canadian Forces Stationed Carp, which on the surface looks like a small radio operation but had a massive bunker hidden 75 feet underground, where most of the government would have relocated. During the Cold War, it was known as the Diefen Bunker, built by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. It's about 35 minutes west of Ottawa. A 100,000 square foot facility that, as you said, includes not just room for the cabinet ministers, and the governor general, and the prime minister, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and all of the other agencies. And a vault for the Bank of Canada's gold reserves. But it also had a fully equipped CBC radio station to broadcast after nuclear war. And this is this was actually one of my favorite details in the all of the research for the book, that the CBC radio studio in the doomsday Bunker had a fully stocked library of vinyl records of jazz favorites, so that even after doomsday in Canada you would be able to still listen to Duke Ellington and the Wayne King orchestra.

MG: Who would be listening to Duke Ellington and the Wayne King orchestra? If war kicks off, what is left of the world?

GARRETT GRAFF: It is a great question. In the answer, and I will preface this by saying any sort of nuclear exchange would be obviously incredibly destructive and world altering, civilization altering. But one of the challenges of the continuity of government plans during the Cold War was that even a full out nuclear exchange would, in the United States, leave between 60 and 80 million people still alive. Which is a you know tremendously large population and that this government, both on the U.S. side and the Canadian side, and you know, effectively all of the you know major governments have similar sets of plans. The U.K., France, NATO, even Russia. And that they are they're trying to design a system that would be able to restart civilization with whatever is left. And the horror of nuclear war is that in fact there would be tens of millions, hundreds of millions, of people left who would be looking to their government for some semblance of service and help, shelter and food.

MG: One of the most unsettling, this is pretty all way through very unsettling book, but one of the bits of it that perhaps is most unsettling is that this is really in the hands of the president of the United States. You talk about the nuclear football that's carried around behind him. You talk about the steps that would be taken to launch the missiles and how little time it would take for them to reach their destinations. There has been a lot of worry in the last several months about President Trump's temperament and decision making process. If he were to decide to launch an attack, a nuclear attack, is there anything in that process that could stop him?

GARRETT GRAFF: The short answer is no. And, as you mentioned, even just last night, James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence until January, said on CNN after Donald Trump's Phoenix rally last night, that he was worried about Donald Trump having the nuclear codes. And the reason to worry is that, during the Cold War, we very deliberately stripped away anything that could slow down or in any way hinder the U.S. president's unconditional launch authority.

MG: So that so that the United States would be able to respond in kind if an attack were to be launched on the U.S.

GARRETT GRAFF: Exactly. And that this is meant to be an incredibly fast and incredibly decisive set of orders. And that from the moment that a president gives a launch order, the first U.S. ICBMs would leave their silos 4 minutes later and arrive in Russia or North Korea or wherever the target is, in approximately 30 minutes after that. So, I mean this is an incredibly fast, incredibly destructive and entirely unchecked power, both on our side and on the Russian side.

MG: Has there ever been a time when somebody, in the White House near those levers of power, warned against that unchecked power, warned against following the instructions by the president to launch a nuclear weapon?

GARRETT GRAFF: Yes and this is this is a fascinating case study. There is precisely one time in U.S. history that we know that this has happened. It was in the final days of the Nixon administration. That's actually how I open the book talking about this scene and this moment and the thinking that went into it. Where in those final days of Watergate Richard Nixon was drinking heavily. He was despondent. He was deeply isolated. And the aides around him did worry that he would, in a fit of drunken anger, launch a pre-emptive nuclear war. And so James Schlesinger, the defense secretary, later said – and we only have James Schlesinger's account of this - that he ordered the Pentagon to, if they received a launch order from the president, to not act on it without double checking with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. And to be clear that is an entirely illegal system. I mean that is there is no legal system that allowed Jim Schlesinger to do that.

MG: But he was so concerned that he felt that that was worth breaking the law.

GARRETT GRAFF: He was so concerned and even went one step further, that in the literal final hours of the Nixon administration, they took away the presidential football from him, that nuclear briefcase that follows the president wherever he is and is the sort of the gateway to the nuclear launch codes. And that did not travel with Richard Nixon in the final hours of his presidency, and remained at the White House with the incoming commander in chief, Gerald Ford. And Nixon never noticed. This only came out years later. But that is the only time that we know in history that this happened. And what we do know is that it was entirely extralegal. I mean there is no similar system in less you know Defense Secretary Jim Mattis or white house chief of staff John Kelly has you know sort of secretly tried to make some sort of similar side deal with the command centers at the Pentagon and at Raven Rock.

MG: It's not easy reading this book but it is incredibly compelling. Garrett Graff, thank you.

GARRETT GRAFF: My pleasure.

MG: Garrett Graff’s new book is Raven Rock the Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of us Die. He was in Colchester Vermont. And as you heard in the early years of the Cold War, if Canada were to be attacked with nuclear weapons, it was up to your CBC to bring calm to this devastated country with some cool jazz. One of the tunes on the playlist, Wayne King Orchestra's Melody of Love. So imagine it's the day after - I mean there's a good chance that you wouldn't be hearing this because you would be dead - but if you were alive, this is what you would hear courtesy of the CBC.

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[Song: Wayne King Orchestra’s Melody of Love]

Why do I love you. I love you not only for what you are

But for what I am when I am with you

I love you not only for what you have made of yourself

But for what you are making of me

I love you for ignoring the possibilities of the fool in me

And for laying firm hold of the possibilities of the good in me

I love you for closing your eyes to the discords in me

And for adding to the music in me by worshipful listening

I love you because you are helping me…

MG: Soothing, isn't? I am Matt Galloway You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE | Where in the world is the best tasting butter?

Guest: Elaine Khosrova

MG: Hello. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Coming up next: For the Love of Butter.

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[Background music]

Is there anything better than butter. Think it over. Every time you taste something that's delicious beyond imagining and you say what is in this, the answer is always going to be: Butter.

MG: That's the correct answer. The movie Julie and Julia has told the story of a young woman, named Julie Powell, who decided to cook every recipe from one of Julia Childs cookbooks, in one year. And a theme emerges in the cooking that she takes on.

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[Background music]

Today there's a meteorite heading toward the earth and we have 30 days to live. I am going to spend it eating better. Here's my final word on the subject. You can never have too much butter.

MG: You don't have to convince the Elaine Khosrova of the joys of butter. The former food editor has written a book. It is called Butter: A Rich History. And she spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in November, in Toronto.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Hello.

AMT: Julia Child and cooks such as her really knew the value of a good dollop of butter. But what got you thinking about it as more than that yellow lump in the fridge?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Absolutely. I really became fascinated with the science and craft of butter because I was working. I worked for about five years for a dairy magazine. It was primarily about cheese. But it took me behind the scenes to farms and dairy processing and I came to see that you know butter is essentially one ingredient and yet it can result in many different variations. You know, ones that are more fudgy, ones that are a little greasy, ones that are super fatty and others that are lighter. The colours, the textures, you know there’s quite a lot of variation.

AMT: You went from cheese to butter?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I did.

AMT: Full time?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. I'm very lucky. [laughs]

AMT: I think I want your job.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah.

AMT: But okay. Let's keep going.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes.

AMT: So as you look at butter, how far back can you trace the origins, the history?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, we'll never know precisely. We know that it began with the domestication of animals and it would have been sheep and goats. It would not have been cows because they weren't domesticated until quite a bit later. So we're talking about 9,000 years ago. The earliest recorded history of butter making is the ancient Sumerians who carved on their temple images of churning and that was 2500 BC. So it's been with us for a really long time.

AMT: Okay. So it's not European North-American. It goes far beyond that.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh, far beyond that. Yes. That came much later.

AMT: And so when other cultures are developing butter, tell me a little bit more about the development. Like was it an accident? What?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh yes. Well, yes. It was most likely an accident in the same way that cheese was an accident. You know if you have milk that's in a container and it would have been probably an animal sack way back when, thousands of years ago. So if it's in there culturing a little bit and then it gets rocked on some journey across the land, you know lo and behold, you open up that bag and you can have these morsels of delicious golden butter. I mean it had a real magical quality, butter, for many thousands of years because people couldn't understand like how is this that liquid can yield this rich fat? So butter was really kind of mystical and magical as well as valuable.

AMT: So you traveled around actually, on the butter chase.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes.

AMT: Tell us about the butter you saw being made in Bhutan.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. So I wanted to go to Bhutan. I wanted to go to the Himalayas to really see yak butter production as it has always been done for centuries and centuries. I would have loved to go to Tibet. I wasn't able to get in because of certain travel restrictions, so I went to Bhutan and my husband and I hiked 13,000 feet up—not easily—to camp among the nomadic people who have yaks and that's their livelihood is to keep these yak herds and to make butter and some cheese from their milk. So I really wanted to not only taste this product but see historically you know it's a little like time travel, when you can watch how someone has made butter with a very primitive churn for thousands of years.

AMT: So tell me more about what you saw and what you tasted.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, I saw first of all that you know the women do everything, of course. I mean that's historically always been true that women were the ones responsible for milking and any kind of milk processing. In fact it was taboo for men to have anything to do with those dairy arts. So I watched as this woman milk the yak in the open field. You know on the highlands of Bhutan, there are no barns, there's no fences, no corrals. The animals just roam free but they come back to the herders. There's a relationship they have with these nomadic people. They come back for the milking which happens every morning. And so I watched that process and then they collect the milk and put it into a plastic barrel and sit it in a stream so it can cool down a bit. You can't churn milk when it's cold. And by the way they don't skim off the cream like we do in North America and in Europe. That's how butter has always been made is by skimming off the cream and churning that. But in Bhutan, they take the whole milk and they ferment it slightly. While it's sitting in the stream, they put in these branches, these wild branches that have a particular bacteria that helps culture the milk a little bit. So then once it has cooled down and fermented for a few hours, I watched as this woman put the milk into the churn. And then by hand, just up and down—it's called a plunger churn—she just kept moving the plunger up and down, up and down. It took about 40 minutes and then we had this beautiful, rich butter. But actually the flavour was quite mild. Yak butter has a reputation of being very funky and strong because most people taste it down in the valley. They don't taste it fresh.

AMT: Oh, when it goes to market.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: When it goes to markets.

AMT: But they don't have refrigeration, huh?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: They don't have refrigeration. It's not pasteurized. It's raw. It's slightly cultured. So by the time it gets down into the valley to the markets, it's developed you know quite a strong flavour.

AMT: And do they put it on bread? What do they do with it?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: They mostly put it in their tea. You know yak butter tea is a tradition across the Himalayas and they drink this mixture of black tea and butter and salt and they essentially whisk it to make it a little bit frothy and emulsify the fat so it's not like floating on top.

AMT: Did you taste that?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I had that quite a lot. And again, I was expecting to gag on it because I've read that yak butter tea can be very strong. And yet, the version that I had in Bhutan was really quite nice. The thing that I didn't like was the salt. I mean I am a tea drinker and the salt was a little weird but the butter wasn't weird at all.

AMT: Okay.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I enjoyed it.

AMT: So you go to Bhutan and then you're on a mission.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes, yes.

AMT: And you end up in India with water buffalo.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah, that was the other—see, butter can be made with the milk or cream of all kinds of ruminant animals. I mean you can even make reindeer butter, you know sheep, goat butter. But I really wanted to get to India because the water buffalo tradition of making butter is disappearing. You know cows have moved in. They've been able to breed cows to withstand the incredible heat in India. Before, it was only the water buffalo that could withstand that so they had this long tradition of water buffalo butter. I wanted to taste that and see it but also, India has a very unique—the women in India—have a unique system of churning using ropes that essentially wrap around a center pole. And so they alternately yank on the ends of this rope and it spins the center pole which has a little cross-piece on the bottom and that makes the churning happen. And every other country that I've seen has either this plunger type or we spin it, you know. We rotate a barrel or something like that to churn the butter. So this was a very different technique that I really wanted to see in action. It was not easy to find because in fact, now women are using blenders and things like that even in the small villages.

AMT: Right. So this is a very traditional way. What part of India did you find this?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I went to the Punjab region so it’s up north and I was able to find it. They were churning it in an industrial bucket, not the typical beautiful you know metal vase that they would have a generation ago. But I was able to actually take the ropes myself and give it a try. It was not very easy. I made a little bit of a mess.

AMT: Do a little churning. And what did it taste like? What did it look like?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh, it was delicious. Absolutely delicious. And I think it's because they—I'm certain in fact—is because they take that milk, it's a super rich milk, and they ferment it overnight. They make something like a yogurt, a super delicious yogurt and they churn that whole milk yogurt. I've had water buffalo butter from Italy that's nothing like the one in India. So I do think that whole culturing overnight gives it an incredibly rich, deep, complex, nutty buttery flavour. It was one of the best butters I've ever had.

AMT: And it's white, right? It’s not yellow.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It’s white. It’s white. Yes. Yes. There's quite a lot of white butters in the world. And I think most people are familiar with the range of colours in cow's butter and in general, the lighter that a cow's butter is, the lighter the colour, it's a pretty good indication that that animal, that cow is not eating too much grass. They're eating more grain. But when you have these naturally white butters, it doesn't indicate that at all. It has to do with the animal metabolism. That's why they're particularly white. So it's not an indication of what the animal's eating.

AMT: Okay. So you go on this butter chase around the world looking at different kinds of butter. But for most of us, it comes in convenient sticks from the grocery store, I guess that's industrialized. When you talk about the tastes, what might—well, what am I missing? What am I missing because I buy—and what's the difference between industrial—you know the industrially made butter and this kind of stuff?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Mmm. Yeah. Very, very different. It helps to realize that butter has three major agents that make it possible. So the butter maker—a man, a person, a woman—and then the animal itself and then the animal feed. So those three factors greatly affect the way a butter looks, the way it tastes, its aroma, its texture. That's why we can have so many variations. It's a little hard to tell I think for most of us who just buy industrial butter in the supermarket. We buy what we always buy.

AMT: And most people who buy it like it.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Right. And there's nothing to knock. I mean I have no grudge at all against the industrialists. When that production started to happen in the mid-20th century, it really raised the bar on sanitation and standardization of the products. You know it was a much safer, better product especially for cooks and bakers. You know you don't want your hollandaise to turn out one way one day and then the next day it doesn't quite turn out. So it's really—we're very lucky to have such standardized butter. At the same time, there are many of these smaller batch butters that if you put them side by side with an industrial butter, you'll see these you know subtle and sometimes stark variations.

AMT: How so? What do you see?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. Well, you'll see first of all, colour is a big one. But texture is to me the most fascinating because I've had butters that were a little bit greasy, a little bit loose, some that are as dense as fudge, very chewy almost because they have so much butter fat in them.

AMT: And what would you be making butter from that would have that texture? What’s the animal?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Primarily cows. Cow’s milk.

AMT: Oh. But it's the way it’s made.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: But it’s the way it's made.

AMT: So it's all in the churning and the fermenting ahead of time or?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It’s the churning and the draining. If you drain more buttermilk off of the butter, then you end up with a butter that has more butterfat, or more solids. You have to have 80 per cent butterfat at least to make a butter. If you have any less than that, it is not considered butter officially. But if you have 82 or 84, 86 per cent butterfat, you end up with a much different product. I mean it behaves differently, especially in baking.

AMT: And so when you look at how butter is used around the world, is it essentially used the same way as it would be used in North America or do you see variations in why butter has become like a universal food?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes. Well, you know if you go to India, they are the largest consumers of butter but of course they take their butter and primarily make ghee out of it and ghee is in all of their cooking. You know they're not inclined to have much toast with butter on it the way we do. So there's a huge variation in the way people use butter around the world.

AMT: There are also religious and spiritual uses for butter that you discovered.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah, it was one of the great surprises in my research because I found that so many ancient cultures used butter as a sacred tool in their spiritual practices. And I knew for instance that the Tibetan monks you know still do these beautiful butter carvings that are the centerpiece of their practice. You know whenever they have a prayer festival, beautiful, elaborate coloured butter sculptures. But I found that the Sumerians, the Druids, Vedic Aryans, Hindus, they all had these practices you know way back when that involved using butter.

AMT: And did they use it purely as butter? Did they mix it with other things to make sculptures?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes. Well, like the Druids made an effigy you know using the handle of a churn. And they used some butter. They would put butter in various parts of the parade procession for their particular festival that they have each spring or had each spring. So it was across the board the way they used it. And there was one group that worshipped a fire god and when they were in the midst of their ritual, they would take ghee, which is clarified butter, and sprinkle it on the flames and cause them to crackle and dance and they would sing these verses that related to butter and how butter made the gods happy.

AMT: It’s fascinating stuff, huh?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It is amazing stuff. Yeah.

AMT: And so when you look at butter in the lives of North Americans, when did things really change? ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, actually the late 1800s, late 1880s was a huge game changer here in the dairy world particularly the butter world because that was when the invention of the cream separator came along. So before the cream separator, people would put—farmers, dairy women—would put out their milk and wait 12 to 24 hours for the cream to rise to the top and then skim it off and make butter. So there was this long process and during that waiting time while the cream was rising, the cream and the milk would ferment slightly. So you never actually had truly fresh cream. And then the cream separator comes along which through centrifugal force, you can basically separate the fat portion from the liquid portion and now you instantly had cream that you could turn into butter. So once that happened, it essentially caused—I say it caused butter to leave home. Butter left the farm where it had always been since farming existed and it went into the factories because now they could separate at the factory, make all the butter at the factory, and then we were on the road to industrialization ever since that particular moment.

AMT: Hmm. At one point, butter becomes enemy number one in our diet. How did that happen?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Oh yes. I did a lot of research on this particular chapter and I do have a degree in food nutrition. It's from the eighties. So my research actually involved unlearning a lot of what I learned in school about fat because fat was being demonized in the eighties and butter in particular. And that was essentially built on a theory that intuitively made a lot of sense to people. You know if we have fat in our arteries that's causing us heart disease it must be because we're eating fat. So let's just eliminate fat. And now we know that simplistic theory you know holds no water at all. It's not true and it led us down a path. You know it's unfortunate because there were other people saying at the time 50 years ago, wait a minute, you know sugar also causes your body to produce fat that can end up in your arteries. What about trans fats? There were a few other scientists back then you know waving this flag saying wait a minute, it's not so simple. But that was ignored essentially by politicians who wanted to create a diet policy that Americans you know could feel good about like okay, now I know how to prevent heart disease. I just won't eat fat.

AMT: And we know of course that this did originate in the United States and it was really one doctor whose views overrode the research of other scientists, nutritionists, doctors at the time.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Ancel Keys. He was quite an ambitious scientist. There's definitely—you know you learn about the politics within the research world when you study this episode. It was pretty fascinating.

AMT: And when we talk about the politics of butter, we can't leave out margarine.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yes, I know. Margarine.

AMT: So even in this country, right? The fight over the colouring of margarine to be yellow to make it look like butter was a fight I think with Quebec dairy farmers, was it not?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: It wasn't until 2008, I believe, that they finally in Quebec, they reversed the law saying that margarine had to be white. It could not be yellow. It couldn't be confused with butter. And actually Canada outlawed margarine completely. In the States, there were a lot of different regulations you know state to state but it wasn't completely criminalized as it was in Canada. So it is a very long battle.

AMT: And when did that change in Canada?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, they had a reprieve during I believe it was the First World War because there was a butter shortage so they did allow some margarine in. But I think it was 1948 when it was decriminalized.

AMT: And why was it banned originally?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: To protect the dairy industry essentially. I mean there was a lot of—what I discovered in my research—there was a lot of really poor quality butter on the market and this would have been in the 1800s, early 1900s. If you couldn't afford good butter, you know you ended up with butter that was often rancid or dirty, you know it had foreign objects in it, you know hair from animals. There was a lot of bad butter. So when margarine came along, it offered people who you know couldn't afford the good stuff a pretty good alternative. In fact it was made with beef fat originally. It was made with whale oil. It was quite a natural product. I can't imagine what it tasted like but it was still better for a lot of people so it was an instant threat to the whole dairy industry and that's why they fought it you know so viciously. I mean they had laws in the States where the margarine had to be coloured pink or black. You know it was essentially let's stigmatize this thing too. So it was a really fascinating battle.

AMT: There were so many different kinds of butter. How has that developed?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Yeah. We have cultured butter because the original butters were cultured. You know as I was saying with the milk having to sit, they were naturally cultured. So some countries, in particular Europe, you know have kept their preference for cultured butter. So now we still have that. But then here in the States, once we had sweet fresh cream that took over. So those were two very different kinds of butter. But now you know there's something called whey cream butter which—one of my favorites actually is a Canadian whey cream butter—and that's made from the leftover whey from cheese making. So the whey actually still has some butterfat in it that's leftover enough. You know when you make tons of cheese, that little bit adds up so they skim off that fat and they make what's called whey cream butter and it has a very nice taste. You know it's definitely more complex. A little toward the cheesy side but you still know you're eating butter.

AMT: And how easy is it to find different kinds of butters like that?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: I think it's harder in Canada [laughs] because you have some pretty strict import quotas here, I think again to protect the dairy industry. In the States, it's quite easy to get different imported butters. And you can also make your own butter so there's another whole option, you know?

AMT: What's your favourite?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, I still rhapsodize about that water buffalo butter in India.

AMT: But you can’t have your own water buffalo in the backyard, right?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: [laughs] Definitely not. Not in the Hudson Valley. There’s really so many good butters out there. I can more easily remember butters I didn't like and usually maybe because they were just kind of bland than all the many butters that I have like. I do like cultured butter but there are some sweet cream butters that I think are so well done, really delicious.

AMT: And what's your favorite thing to do with butter?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Well, yeah. I do really love a great pie. You know a tender, flaky buttery crust. But I can't eat pie every day. But I can eat bread and butter every day, just about.

AMT: And do you?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Pretty much. Yes, I do. But you know it ends up being a tablespoon. You know it sounds like a lot—oh, butter everyday—but it's not like we sit down and eat it, or me, I certainly don't. My family, we don't sit down to a stick of butter or a half a stick of butter. It's a tablespoon here, a tablespoon there you know. And I generally look for grass fed butter. I know that it nutritionally—it tends to taste better and it looks better but nutritionally it definitely has more nutrients in it than butter that's from feedlot or grain fed cows.

AMT: Okay. You've gone from cheese to butter. What do you do next?

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Mmm. I'm not actually done with butter. I'm still hoping to get to places like Ethiopia which has a really old rich butter culture and they have lots of rituals where they for instance, brides are slathered in butter and clay before they're married. It's part of their process. And in Morocco, they bury butter in the ground when a girl is born and they take it out on her wedding day. It's this aged butter that is buried in the ground. So I'm really hoping I can continue this journey. The book is done but I'm not done with butter. [laughs]

AMT: Well, happy travels. Thank you again.

ELAINE KHOSROVA: Thank you very much.

MG: Are you hungry now? I'm hungry now. That was Anna Maria Tremonti’s interview with Elaine Khosrova. She is the author of Butter: A Rich History. To see pictures of butter making in India and Bhutan from Elaine’s travels head to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Coming up: When you're young you can take a lot of time and effort to find your voice, to feel like you can stand up alongside the grown ups and then eventually speak your mind. Lisa Charleyboy will share stories of youth taking a stand including a conversation with the prime minister that left one young woman facing a fierce backlash. That's next, on New Fire. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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August 23, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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