Melted butter

Popcorn is a staple in every college dorm. My 18^th birthday present, few weeks before I went off to college, was an air popper with built-in butter melting dish, along with a jar of Orville Redenbacher kernels and a salt shaker. It was a fun ritual, plugging in this souped-up hair dryer and gathering around in our fuzzy slippers (I lived in an all-girl dorm my freshman year, at my father's insistence). We soon discovered it was easier to place a little bowl on top to melt the butter than use the poorly-designed and impossible to clean butter melter thingy. It was really fun to take the lid off and try to catch flying popcorn.

I imagine a similar scenario playing out in today's dorms, replaced by bags of microwave popcorn purchased from a mega-warehouse, with maybe even a small microwave oven for the well-heeled preppies. But there's less challenge in breaking open a wrapper and pressing the popcorn button and then trying to catch the door before you smell the burnt smell.

And now the headlines read of the horrors of the buttery flavor, diacetyl, an additive that not only doesn’t taste like real butter (think of the yellow goop in your movie snack bucket), but clogs the lungs of people exposed to it in large quantities, like popcorn factory workers, professional chefs and short-order cooks, as well as people who each huge amounts of microwave popcorn. It’s everywhere it seems—in cooking oils, butter-flavored cooking sprays and margarines.

Well, you say, at least I’m not affected, for I eat real butter. And that's what I was assuming until I kept reading. It appears that even buying real butter doesn’t shield us from diacetyl. As illogical as it sounds, most major brands of real butter contain butter flavor, including some organic brands. It’s in the list of ingredients, hidden in the ubiquitous “natural flavors” mystery ingredient.

So what’s a girl to do? At least one San Francisco restaurateur has gone so far as to start making his own butter, and the New York Times actually published his butter recipe. Registration is required to access the article, but I’m going to assume you know how to make butter. Little One can tell you how it’s done, taking turns shaking a mason jar full of cream while the bread is baking. Some adults may go more upscale, using an electric mixer. I’m even lazier, reading labels to find an organic brand whose only ingredient is cream (I buy unsalted butter, preferring to control the amount of butter in my cooking and baking).

But it looks like we've done it to ourselves again: we have taken a traditional food, made on a small scale in a traditional way, and turned it into a mass-produced food commodity. When we began to manufacture milk products, we lost the ability to skim off the cream (and have real buttermilk for biscuits and pancakes in the process); we had to buy our butter in paper-wrapped cubes. We have homogenized our milk, homogenizing in the process our society, making sure that every stick of butter tastes the same, by adding a chemical that poorly mimics nature.

So where does that leave us? In practical terms, I can still buy butter, if I’m careful, and I may even be able to find microwave popcorn that is both free of genetic modifications and diacetyl. But it would be cheaper to place a brown paper bag of bulk organic popcorn in the microwave (check out the great video and discussion at instructables). It turns out it’s considerably cheaper, and it’s much more fun, especially if you have fuzzy slippers and some friends to share it with.