I think we can all agree, neurotypical or -divergent, that this is a stupid trend and that TikTok is terrible.
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Oh, we’re all singing in mighty chorus there.
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The times is on it
among the insights:
It’s not a new idea:
Though she may have been the butter board’s digital midwife, Ms. Doiron credits the chef and cookbook author Joshua McFadden with the idea.
A butter board appears in his James Beard Award-winning 2017 book “Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables,” which he wrote with Martha Holmberg.
It’s not inherently disgusting from a food safety perspective
Salted butter is safe to leave out for four hours at room temperature, said Benjamin Chapman, the department head of agricultural and human sciences at North Carolina State University. Unlike the average American who prefers to keep their butter at much cooler temperatures, people in many other Western countries often leave butter out on the counter for easy spreading.
or from a cross contamination perspective.
Utensils are your friend. Set out knives alongside so guests don’t treat the butter board like, well, hummus. (Ms. Doiron said the “biggest mistake” in her video was tearing off a piece of bread to dip into the butter.)
or from a cleaning up perspective
The type of board matters. A wood cutting board may look rustic, but that gets gunky quickly. Place parchment paper over the board for easier cleanup, or opt for a marble or slate surface.
so while it may appear that this is just one of those absurdist trends produced by the continual arbitrage of late stage capitalism, seemingly impervious to conventional critique, it’s just a momentarily photogenic way to serve food that may or may not be tasty.
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So it’s a compound butter presented in a rustic way? Nothing revolutionary, but also neither disgusting nor weird to me.
But maybe that’s because I come from a food on wooden boards culture.
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Joke all you want. I’m not drawing any lines here, nor do I take any issues with “punching up” as a humor device even if I’m the butt of the joke. I don’t offend easily, and for what it’s worth I’m not neurotypical either.
Not having any background about the source or any real context beyond the snippet in the OP, it just seemed rather quizzical to me. The additional context and framing it in a “white culture” vein does add some perspective for me, though.
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They don’t have the lifespan of a butter board in a hot room.
(he said, not expecting this figure of speech to last for very long either . . .)
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Hush, lest you incur the wrath of the Milk Marketing Board and they send one of their elite operatives in their hi-tech, silent vehicles to your house in the early morning hours.
“Where is stinkingbadgers?”, the neighbours would say.
The only clue to your disappearance would be the six gold top left on your doorstep…
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“Normies” evokes 4chan too much? I don’t know, maybe it’s intended to point out that “normal” is a statistical construct that doesn’t actually exist, and that all members of humanity are subtly different flavors of weird, like different jams on a butter board.
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Do they suggest a refried bean board?
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Oh my. look at this strange thing I don’t like. That’s why we all hate the out-group, right?
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There are other uses for butter
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And I think that’s actually the point. The way a lot of social media algorithms work make posts that generate outrage really successful. Last year, there were a ton of TikToks of people making spaghetti and meatballs and shit directly on their kitchen counter and serving it that way, and claiming it was a hot new trend. It was all bullshit, and most of it was coming from the same content creator, if you traced everything back far enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was more of the same, inspired by Adam Ragusea’s famous video about seasoning his cutting board not his steak.
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I read this along the lines of the fairly popular series of vids titled with variants of “The Straights Are Not All Right” or “The Kids Are All Right,” or such. I don’t think there is any way to determine that folks who do this are infect neurotypical, but they certainly have questionable judgement regarding hygienic appetizer consumption. This is worse than a common dip bowl for salsa!
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I had read the article, and was befuddled by these two lines appearing next to each other without any acknowledgment or explanation.
So much of the world (me included) leave butter on the counter, and yet it’s only safe to leave it out for four hours?
Obviously that’s ridiculous, butter can stay on the counter for much longer than four hours. Where did they get that number from?
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You can leave butter out until it goes rancid, then your taste buds will inform you it’s no longer good to eat.
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4 hours is the standard amount of time for food to be in the “danger zone” between 40F and 140F according to American food safety regulations.
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I went to a farm dinner and they made “single-udder butter” from their dairy cows. (This was of course all pastured cows on a biodynamic farm). I believe there were 3 or 4 different butters to taste; served air temp on a bit of bread and 4 or 5 large flakes of sea salt. The difference was astounding! Like gouda vs gruyere vs cheddar in terms of range of flavors. Really remarkable. If you like butter, seek this out sometime!
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You could always have your jam from the hollow head of Boris Johnson.
Combine with 3D printing…
eta: Or really, just squirt it into a mold. No need for high tech unless doing a lot of one-offs.
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Oh No! Smør-panik!
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