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Here at Half as Interesting, some weeks we’re busy and short on time and so we find some
dumb little fact, paraphrase the Wikipedia page, steal some jokes from late 2000s Tumblr
meme pages, and call it a video. But other weeks? Well, other weeks we stumble upon a
dumb little fact that’s so dumb and so little, that even though it turns out there’s hardly
any easily-findable information on it, instead of abandoning it and doing something easier,
we go down a rabbit hole that ends in us reading the entirety of a 47 page report from 1948
about the history of butter packaging… and guess what kind of week this was.
So here’s the situation. The United States has a regional butter shape divide. I know:
regional… butter… shape… divide. It’s the four weirdest, yet most intriguing words
to be put together since “California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
East of the Rockies, butter traditionally comes in long, thin sticks that look like
this, 4 ¾ inches long, 1 ¼ inches wide—or whatever it says on screen for metric—stacked
two by two like this, and sold in a boxy kind of box. But west of the Rockies, butter comes
in a shorter, stubbier form, 3 1/8 inches long and 1 ½ inches wide, sold side by side
in a flat box. To understand why, allow me to introduce you
to Milton E. Parker, author of the 1948 historical treatise “Princely Packets of Golden Health:
A History of Butter Packaging.” Milton was the former director of the American Dairy
Science Association, and he was also a sublime combination between genius and madman who
sandwiched 47 pages about butter packaging between two quotes from the bible about butter,
making a sort of bible butter sandwich, which incidentally is the state sandwich of Alabama.
After starting off with a few pages where he calls butter, “the everlasting delight
of the gourmand,” explains its “majestic origin” and compares butter to atomic fission,
Milton tells us that farm production of butter started to assume shape around 1791, and through
its history, would be sold in a variety of different shapes—lumps, balls, rolls, squares—put
in an array of packing apparatus—linen, muslin, wooden tubs, paraffin paper, tins,
barrels, and even something called a firkin—and would be shaped by a number of different mechanisms—wooden
paddles called butter clappers, molds, “butter cutters,” and the hands of underpaid child
laborers. But our story really begins in 1896, when
the National Biscuit Company decided to market a new type of soda cracker with the wonderful
name “Uneeda Biscuit,” presumably thought up by the same people who came up with “I.P.
Freely and Sermore Butz,” and the non-peacock NBC folks hired a man named Frank M. Peters
to come up with a way to package them. And boy did he ever, producing a packaging revolution
that wrapped the biscuits in an inner wrap of waxed paper, inside of a cardboard carton
with a printed over-wrap. The packaging world reacted to this so-called Peters’ package
with a collective “no cap, fam, this hits different” prompting the President of the
Continental Creamery Company of Topeka Kansas to yeet a meeting with Mr. Peters and the
National Biscuit Company. Now, unlike our beloved Milton E. Parker, I won’t bore you
with the details of that meeting, but the point is, soon the Peters’ package was licensed
for butter, and creamy cow juice was being sold in the wax paper inside cardboard packaging
we all know and love and build little forts out of because we haven’t gone outside in
a year. But we’re not here to talk about Fort Butterston
nor its leader, General Butt R. Butterston Jr., nor are we here to talk about the fort’s
anthem, “This Land O’ Lakes Is Your Land.” We’re here to talk about butter sticks.
Now, originally, even in the Peters’ package, the butter was not sold in sticks, but in
one-pound squares. The quarter pound sticks began in 1907, when the Swift & Company Creamery
got a letter from their New Orleans unit stating that the chef of the Checker and Chess Club
“would like to be supplied with butter in ¼ pound prints which would enable him to
slice off for table use without waste or delay.” They did, and quarter-pound butter sticks,
or quar-pou-bu-sti—that’s not what people called them that’s just what I call them—soon
caught on. Now, much of the butter packaging equipment used in the east to produce the
quarter-pound sticks was purchased sometime in the 1920s and 1930s, and most of those
machines, including the dominant brand, made by the Elgin Butter Tub Company in Illinois,
produced long, thin, sticks—and thus the Eastern shape of butter, known as the Elgin,
was born. “But why are things different with West”
you ask, like Kim Kardashian’s divorce attorney. Well, you have to understand that for a long
time, the eastern United States ruled the dairy game. They had plenty of milk for all
your milk-based needs: drinking, making milk byproducts like butter, waterboarding the
gingerbread man, and so on, but the Western US wasn’t so lucky: they basically only
had enough dairy cows to make drinking milk, and none left over for dairy byproducts. But,
like rock and roll, civil rights, and JFK being not-assassinated, that changed in the
1960s, when the West started ramping up dairy production. By 1975, California was the second
leading dairy producer in the country, accounting for 9.4% of all production—at least, according
to a 30 page USDA report on US Milk Production that I never imagined having to read when
I uploaded a video about a really long drive three years ago.
That late growth of the Western dairy industry is the key to understanding the fault in our
but-tars. By the time the West had enough milk to start making butter, the traditional
Elgin machines that were used to print butter on the East Coast were no longer available,
and so West coast creameries ordered newer equipment, which cut the butter into shorter,
fatter sticks, called Western Stubbies—a name so funny I can’t write a joke better
than it. As time went on, people in different areas got used to their different butter shapes.
Today, butter companies like Land O’ Lakes maintain two sets of butter printing machines,
so that they can supply different butter sizes to the East and West coasts. And there you
have it: yet another butter mystery solved. You know what’s the same size on both coasts,
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