artificially flavoured!

Prepare yourself for a good old fashioned shock...

This gem was nominated in the category of most mentions of butter in a non-butter context. The actual winner was a sofa commercial that showed happy couples collapsing into each other’s arms on a soft, stylish sofa intercut with images of children jumping on the same 10-year-guaranteed washable covers, all set to a soundtrack of James Earl Jones saying “butter” repeatedly for two straight minutes.

But this product has something that no James Earl Jones sofa montage can claim. Existence outside of my imagination? Sure, but it also possesses something yet more precious, or at least commercially viable.

Natural Butter Flavor

“What? Butter, you mean?” I hear you scoff disdainfully. “Like I can’t lay my hands on that any day of the working week,” you sneer haughtily. “Oh no, my friend,” I counter loquaciously, taking an intriguing pause before the final blow… “Contains no butter,” I conclude amid poorly stifled gasps and one heartfelt cry of “When will the madness end?” 

That’s right, folks. Here I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that to make something buttery, butter must be added. Time enough to shatter some illusions:

• You don’t catch colds from being out in the cold.
• People have known the earth is round since Ancient Greece, and no-one thought Columbus would fall off the edge.
• Glass isn’t a high viscosity liquid, and everyone has been lying to you all along.

And now, the most shocking revelation since Pluto got demoted to a dwarf planet:

Butter doesn’t taste of butter.

This is the only plausible explanation. Butter has no taste and a mystery substance actually provides the “butter” flavour. Like all trade secrets its source is jealously guarded by those in the know, but I personally hope that the natural butter flavour comes from the butterfruit, which I hope is the size of a watermelon and the colour of butterscotch. Basically a giant Werther’s Original in the form of a citrus fruit, allowing its buttery goodness to be squeezed and used to flavour dairy products.  

I hope they come from a tropical island populated only by exotic birds and small pig-like creatures, who caper joyfully through the undergrowth, and gorge themselves contentedly on butterfruit, the juice glinting in the sunlight as it runs thickly down their corpulent chins.

That would certainly be a lot better than it being high fructose corn syrup.