I love butter. I could eat a fresh baguette smeared with a thick slab every day and never get bored. I’m not alone in harboring fantasies of this indulgence: Americans inhaled 6.8 pounds of butter per person in 2024, the most ever in at least 50 years.
“I’ve always been a bit of a butter snob,” actress and comedian Heather McMahan, host of the Absolutely Not podcast, tells me. “Good butter has always been my thing.”
In one of her recent episodes, McMahan detailed a trip to Paris and her subsequent journey home with 12 (yes, 12) sticks of butter nestled in the depths of her suitcase. This led me down the delightful rabbit hole of butter connoisseurship that’s engulfed social media.
Everywhere I scroll, people are obsessed.
While McMahan has also brought home butter from Japan, Italy and other travels, the internet seems particularly enamored with the French heavy hitters right now.
There’s a viral video of a new mom getting an 11-pound bucket of Isigny Ste-Mère as her “push present.” (BTW, you can also custom order said bucket.) I’ve watched people document their dedicated trips to Saint-Malo, France, ground-zero for European butter production. And who can ignore Reel after Reel of giddy tourists loading up shopping baskets with Maison Bordier butter from Paris’s La Grande Épicerie?
“Butter has entered the chat as something worth traveling for,” laughs Anna Stockwell, author of The Butter Book. “It just keeps getting trendier and trendier.”
These folks gracing my feed aren’t settling for your average grocery store sticks. Or even Irish Kerrygold, which Stockwell lovingly refers to as “gateway butter.” No, they’re seeking out and even making pilgrimages for the definitively more delicious continental European varieties.
“It’s unlike [any butter] that's in the US,” gushes Meghan Donovan, founder of travel planning agency En Route to Rêverie and one of the first viral butter tourism Reel creators.
In the US, butter has to contain at least 80% butterfat. In Europe, it’s 82% minimum. Sounds like a rounding error, but the extra couple of percentage points of creamy fat is what really intensifies the flavor. Also, most European butter is cultured, yielding a tangy and slightly nutty flavor versus the more muted flavors you’ll find in traditional American sweet cream butter.
Frankly, Euro butter is dreamier than its stateside counterparts. You could even eat it like a piece of cheese if you wanted. (Don’t tempt us with a good time.)
Today’s butter tourism is a far cry from the margarine soaked days of the ’70s where butter and its fatty gloriousness was practically shunned. In her book, Stockwell notes the fall of butter to disproven studies from the 1950s that linked eating saturated fats (which butter has plenty of) to things like heart disease. The low-fat diet craze of the 1980s didn’t help butter’s cause either, she points out.
So what’s driving butter’s prolific resurgence, then? Beyond the obvious that it’s tasty?
Michelle Webb, butter enthusiast and co-owner of Wedgewood Cheese Bar in Carrboro, North Carolina, has a theory.
She reminds me that the so-called Lipstick Effect is a real economic indicator. “Chanel will sell more lipstick [during slower economies], because customers aren’t going to buy the bag,” Webb says, speculating that people are spending more on little luxuries—like lipstick and now, butter—when there’s a fear of recession or economic downturn.
Spending $24 on a few ounces of specialty butter in a local shop feels 100% worth it. While I can’t take a private jet to Paris right now (or ever?) to go straight to the source, I can ball out buying a bit of tangy, cultured butter.
“Butter has kind of had a [glow-up],” Webb says, adding that nothing is certain in life except for “death, taxes and butter.” Amen.
For McMahan and Donovan it’s slightly more simple.
“In the current state of the world, people realize life is short,” McMahan stresses. “Why go for the cheap shit when you could go for the real thing?”
“Butter just brings people a lot of joy,” Donovan adds.
If you haven’t sunk your teeth into one of these butters the internet is evangelizing, I’m sorry. Kind of.
Because once you have your first bite of Bordier, Les Prés Salés, Rodolphe Le Meunier or Isigny Ste-Mère you won’t be able to put the genie back into the bottle. Do with that knowledge what you will, but remember that life is too short to not have good butter.
Keep your butter chilled until it’s time to fly. Use a ziplock bag or vacuum seal it so you won’t ruin your other belongings if it melts. You don’t have to check butter, but if it isn’t solid in your carry-on, TSA may consider it a liquid and confiscate it.
Airplane cargo-holds are climate-controlled, so your butter should make it home fairly unscathed. During the summer, pop it into an insulated lunch bag to help reduce any meltage from sitting on the tarmac.