Butter's butter, right?
It's made from cow's milk, it's natural, it's loaded with cholesterol, it's a carefully cultivated heart attack if you spread it thick enough on your toast each morning.
Bah! Frankly, who cares? It is butter and it tastes like butter. Fresh bread without butter is like sex without a fantasy. (Sorry, but my editor says if I can use the word 'sex' in a column we get more page impressions, so I'm just doing as I'm told...).
I mean, what's the point? It's just bread!
Of course, (cynical, highly-funded) counsel tell us today that butter is bad for us. They invent products with absurdly silly names such as 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter' to try to lure us away from relatively natural churned cow's milk to artificially produced yellow stuff which anyone with half a brain CAN actually believe is not butter. Nothing like it.
Which is the long way to introduce a new product which crossed our desk this week which claims to be as tasty as butter, considerably healthier and a wise investment at $4.99 a 375gm pack.
And shock, horror, they're right!
AVO - billed as "the healthier spread alternative" and carrying the highly expensive but barely credible (these days) Heart Foundation 'Tick' - is actually the best spread we've encountered since - well, butter.
The significance of this endorsement should not be lost on readers. The author is a Kiwi, raised on a farm and whose first exposure to margarine was seeing a cross-dressing bloke called Marge turn up at bowling club tea parties during TV ad breaks with her poorly shaven moustache and Vinnies-sourced frock, ready to ruin the event before a wised-up guest exclaimed, "not Marge again!".
This was New Zealand, circa 1990. Sheep were still in vogue. Cross-dressing certainly wasn't.
Butter on a Kiwi farm is like a choir boy at St Vincent's: sacred. To be cherished and enjoyed. Only you can share with everyone how good it is!
AVO is the first genuine pretender to butter's taste crown I have ever tasted. Margarine is rubbish: as all the market research has repeatedly told its makers. It might spread easily, but it's tasteless, bland and as utterly boring as any other food promoted to us as healthy and virtuous. It sells to people who are too ashamed to be seen buying butter in public. And there are obviously a lot of those people around, because despite its tastelessness, margarine sells. And has done for more than 30 years since governments removed its status as a prescription-only medicine.
AVO, according to its unidentified makers, "looks like butter" but contains 45 per cent less fat and 55 per cent less salt. Who cares what it looks like? A Lexus 300 LOOKS like a Toyota and - well - it IS a Toyota! But does it drive differently?
In AVO's case, it tastes as good as butter, which is the only factor that is relevant, bar its health properties.
Avocado Oil is widely recognised as considerably healthier as a cooking aid than most other vegetable oils. It also burns at a higher temperature making it a wise choice for cooking.
But as the basis of a butter substitute spread, this is an inspired product. Just why did it take so long?!
Rich in Vitamins A and D, low in trans fat (less than one per cent) and lower in sodium and saturated fats, it's a product which performs the rare double act of proving healthier without sacrificing flavour.
AVO is sold through Woolworths and Coles supermarkets Australia-wide and in selected IGA stores in NSW and Victoria.
It's not cheap, but compared to Marge it's a veritable bargain!