Editorial: Spread it around - butter war is over

The soaring cost of butter is hard to digest.

This week we heard that butter prices leapt 62 per cent in a year.

So much so that the average price of the cheapest block now costs $5.67. This time last year the same block would set you back $3.50.

We've also seen that butter prices are hurting eateries - so much so Indian restaurants are now serving Margarine Chicken.

Jokes aside, the premium price is biting commercially and domestically, where in kitchens butter is as crucial as heat.

Bakeries especially must be feeling it; so too the consumer, who no doubt has to part with more of the folding stuff in exchange for a croissant.

While global factors have played a part, so too has demand pushed the price up. That's why there's a kernel of positivity in these high prices.

That is, there's an appreciable and welcome resurgence in our appetite for saturated fats. Sugar, it seems, has usurped fat as the new evil and the once vilified dairy spread is hitting its straps not just with professional culinarians.

Worryingly, its newfound luxury status places it out of reach for some, meaning we may see a resurgence of the biggest non-food ever to lurk in Kiwi fridges. I'm talking margarine - useless unless you enjoy desecrating hot toast.

This non-dairy, oily discharge was the brainchild of chemists and accordingly one once needed a prescription to purchase it.

The scary take-home message is that the formerly marginalised margarine is poised for a comeback.

The positive take-home message is that said new prices signal the end of the war on butter.