4,000 Tons of Emergency Holiday Butter Is Headed to Canada

Holiday food isn't exactly light, and even the most soigné of home chefs will be reliant on butter for crowd-pleasers like stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, cakes, and cookies.

Despite being a world leader in butter production, it would seem that Canada's insatiable appetite for the creamy stuff during the holiday season has forced it to resort to unprecedented measures.

In an effort to ensure that people are not deprived of their god-given right to a fatty, starchy holiday season, the Canadian Dairy Commission is making an exceptional order of 4,000 tons, or 8.8 million pounds of butter, La Presse reports. The strategic reserve of butter will be imported from dairy allies in the US, New Zealand, Ireland, Belgium, and Uruguay.

It may be tempting to accuse Keep It Canada's very own Matty Matheson of being singlehandedly responsible for this Canadian shortage with a stuffing recipe that requires two cups of butter and three loafs of bread, but home cooks can hardly put a dent in the butter consumption of commercial pastry-makers, whose peak season is the holidays.

That being said, Canadian consumers are undergoing a renewed love affair with butter, according to Canadian Dairy Commission spokesperson Chantal Paul, who told La Presse that since 2014, "there has been an increase in butter consumption."

Despite a significant fall in milk consumption, it would appear that Canadians are putting more cream in their coffee and more butter on their bread and the Canadian Dairy Commission also confirmed that they had to get special permission from the federal government in order to make the 4,000-ton order.

This is hardly the first time that an affluent nation has dealt with the threat of a butter shortage during the holidays. Last year, Japan came dangerously close to running out of butter after a particularly hot summer caused a heat stroke in dairy cows which led to a severe shortage of butter. The Japanese government forced farmers to up their output by 500 tons and imported a whopping 7,000 tons of butter to deal with it.

Whether the shortage in Japan had anything to do with the young people slathering heaps of butter on every kind of food imaginable and posting it on social media remains unknown, but one thing is for sure; governments do not fool around when it comes to keeping their people fat and happy during the holidays.