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Business Standard

Butter's 47% global price surge finds explanation in a cult novel

The world is losing its mind about butter. In New Zealand, which accounts for nearly half of the world's butter exports, prices rose 46.5 per cent in the year through June, to NZ$8.60 ($5.10) for a 500-gram (1.1-pound) block. This has assumed the scale of a national crisis. The country's Prime Minister Christopher Luxon clashed with a reporter at a press conference last month when asked the current cost. Miles Hurrell, chief executive officer of Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd., New Zealand's biggest company by revenue and owner of the Anchor dairy brand, faced criticism after defending the prices as good news for the country. It's not the only place where lovers of dairy fat are feeling the pinch. French newspaper Les Echos speculated last month that supply shortfalls may lead to butter shortages by Christmas. Prices in the UK are their highest in at least 12 years, at £4.86 ($6.45) for 500 grams. Restaurants in London are substituting olive oil, which has been falling from last year's record levels. The Food and Agriculture Organization's butter price index in June hit its highest level since it started in 1990. What's going on? A Japanese novel first published eight years ago may provide some clues. Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, has become a cult bestseller in English-language markets after a translation was published in 2024. It's an intoxicating mix, combining cooking and murder with a feminist meditation on anomie and body image in modern Japan — think Silence of the Lambs crossed with Julie & Julia and Audition. Throughout the novel, butter is used as a synecdoche for all the sensory pleasures that the goal- and diet-obsessed protagonists are denying themselves: food, sex, and a life free of pervasive, unshakeable guilt. Manako Kajii, the transgressive, charismatic, overweight serial killer at the heart of the story, inveigles the main character Rika into her world by exhorting her to never eat margarine again, and instead consume a dish of rice with soy sauce and butter. It is portrayed as the ultimate comfort food: 'When the world is this unfair and unfriendly, people want to do the things that give them satisfaction, that fortify and protect them,' Rika muses at one point, after cooking a French-style meal at a high-class cooking school. That feels like a message well-suited to the world of 2025. If you're inclined to the MAGA view of life, eating your red meat drenched in Café de Paris butter might feel like a protest against soyboy vegans pushing oat milk and guilt-tripping you about 2.1 billion tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions from the dairy industry. If you're on the opposite end of the partisan spectrum, the self-care involved in watching the Great British Bake-Off or whipping up a batch of cookies might be another sort of political act. There's another crucial factor in Yuzuki's novel, though. Traditional Japanese food is almost never eaten. That's in keeping with the other thing driving global butter prices: The vogue for European cooking, and in particular butter-heavy baked goods, for the growing middle class in Asia and the Middle East. If you exclude the value of trade between members of the European Union, China is now the world's biggest importer of butter. Saudi Arabia imports more than the UK, while Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea and Mexico aren't far behind. Imports to China this year will rise 11 per cent from 2024, according to the US Department of Agriculture, thanks to rising consumption of baked goods. This wouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's spent much time on social media lately. Asian cake chains like China's Holiland and South Korea's Butterful & Creamorous are mainstays of Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and Xiaohongshu. At the World Pastry Cup, a biennial event held in Lyon, Japanese teams have won both of the two most recent contests, with Malaysia coming third this year. The delights of high-quality dairy are hard to deny. We've come a long way from the ascetic 1990s, when Anthony Bourdain launched his career as a bold contrarian with a New Yorker article arguing, shockingly, that this 'much maligned food' tastes great. Still, there's something a little melancholic about our current love affair with the stuff. Suzuki's Rika at one point visits Château Restaurant Joël Robuchon, a Tokyo outpost of the late French chef who made mashed potatoes seem opulent by adding unfeasible quantities of butter. She eats alone, because in her atomized life there's no one — not her boyfriend, best friend, or mother — who she'd want to go with. Her fellow diners are graying salarymen on transactional dates with younger women. She's left with a bout of indigestion. That feels a fitting metaphor for our current state of affairs. We live on a planet racked by war and famine, where trade and growth are slowing, work is unrelenting, social ties are fraying, and temperatures are rising. Even at current prices, a taste of butter — like a visit to Joël Robuchon — is a glimpse into a world of luxury that's feeling increasingly out of reach. These days, we'll take whatever comfort we can get.