France, Land of Croissants, Finds Butter Vanishing From Shelves
Always butter!” but Professor Pitte said France had moved past the butter-heavy style of cooking popularized in the United States by Julia Child.
“The absence of certain products on shelves is an indicator of tensions between some large retailers and their suppliers,” the Cniel said in its report, noting
that many retailers were refusing to pay the increased market price for butter.
“So yes, we are inevitably affected, and have been for several months now.”
Jean-Robert Pitte, a geographer and gastronomy specialist at the Sorbonne University in Paris, said
that France had traditionally been split between a butter-dominated north and an olive oil-using south, but those divisions had broken down.
In France alone, butter consumption increased 5 percent from 2013 to 2015, according to
a recent report by an umbrella organization for France’s dairy industry, Le Cniel.
“When I was little, there was hardly any olive oil in Paris,” Professor Pitte said.
“I thought to myself: Not having butter in France, that’s appalling,” she said.
“Over the past year, from June of 2016 to this summer, milk production has fallen in Europe,” he said.
Meanwhile, as butter has shed some of its unhealthy image, demand has risen worldwide, especially in the United States
— where the fast-food chain McDonald’s promised to put butter back in its recipes last year — and in China.
Last year, France consumed about 18 pounds of butter per capita, according to statistics from a coming report by the International Dairy Federation.