This video was made possible by CuriosityStream.
Get the CuriosityStream/Nebula bundle deal, on sale right now for less than $15 for the
whole year, at CuriosityStream.com/HAI. Here at Half as Interesting, some weeks we’re
busy and short on time and so we find some dumb little fact, paraphrase the Wikipedia
page, steal some jokes from late 2000s Tumblr meme pages, and call it a video. But other
weeks? Well, other weeks we stumble upon a dumb little fact that’s so dumb and so little,
that even though it turns out there’s hardly any easily-findable information on it, instead
of abandoning it and doing something easier, we go down a rabbit hole that ends in us reading
the entirety of a 47 page report from 1948 about the history of butter packaging… and
guess what kind of week this was. So here’s the situation. The United States
has a regional butter shape divide. I know: regional… butter… shape… divide. It’s
the four weirdest, yet most intriguing words to be put together since “California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger.” East of the Rockies, butter traditionally
comes in long, thin sticks that look like this, 4 ¾ inches long, 1 ¼ inches wide—or
whatever it says on screen for metric—stacked two by two like this, and sold in a boxy kind
of box. But west of the Rockies, butter comes in a shorter, stubbier form, 3 1/8 inches
long and 1 ½ inches wide, sold side by side in a flat box.
To understand why, allow me to introduce you to Milton E. Parker, author of the 1948 historical
treatise “Princely Packets of Golden Health: A History of Butter Packaging.” Milton was
the former director of the American Dairy Science Association, and he was also a sublime
combination between genius and madman who sandwiched 47 pages about butter packaging
between two quotes from the bible about butter, making a sort of bible butter sandwich, which
incidentally is the state sandwich of Alabama. After starting off with a few pages where
he calls butter, “the everlasting delight of the gourmand,” explains its “majestic
origin” and compares butter to atomic fission, Milton tells us that farm production of butter
started to assume shape around 1791, and through its history, would be sold in a variety of
different shapes—lumps, balls, rolls, squares—put in an array of packing apparatus—linen,
muslin, wooden tubs, paraffin paper, tins, barrels, and even something called a firkin—and
would be shaped by a number of different mechanisms—wooden paddles called butter clappers, molds, “butter
cutters,” and the hands of underpaid child laborers.
But our story really begins in 1896, when the National Biscuit Company decided to market
a new type of soda cracker with the wonderful name “Uneeda Biscuit,” presumably thought
up by the same people who came up with “I.P. Freely and Sermore Butz,” and the non-peacock
NBC folks hired a man named Frank M. Peters to come up with a way to package them. And
boy did he ever, producing a packaging revolution that wrapped the biscuits in an inner wrap
of waxed paper, inside of a cardboard carton with a printed over-wrap. The packaging world
reacted to this so-called Peters’ package with a collective “no cap, fam, this hits
different” prompting the President of the Continental Creamery Company of Topeka Kansas
to yeet a meeting with Mr. Peters and the National Biscuit Company. Now, unlike our
beloved Milton E. Parker, I won’t bore you with the details of that meeting, but the
point is, soon the Peters’ package was licensed for butter, and creamy cow juice was being
sold in the wax paper inside cardboard packaging we all know and love and build little forts
out of because we haven’t gone outside in a year.
But we’re not here to talk about Fort Butterston nor its leader, General Butt R. Butterston
Jr., nor are we here to talk about the fort’s anthem, “This Land O’ Lakes Is Your Land.”
We’re here to talk about butter sticks. Now, originally, even in the Peters’ package,
the butter was not sold in sticks, but in one-pound squares. The quarter pound sticks
began in 1907, when the Swift & Company Creamery got a letter from their New Orleans unit stating
that the chef of the Checker and Chess Club “would like to be supplied with butter in
¼ pound prints which would enable him to slice off for table use without waste or delay.”
They did, and quarter-pound butter sticks, or quar-pou-bu-sti—that’s not what people
called them that’s just what I call them—soon caught on. Now, much of the butter packaging
equipment used in the east to produce the quarter-pound sticks was purchased sometime
in the 1920s and 1930s, and most of those machines, including the dominant brand, made
by the Elgin Butter Tub Company in Illinois, produced long, thin, sticks—and thus the
Eastern shape of butter, known as the Elgin, was born.
 “But why are things different with West” you ask, like Kim Kardashian’s divorce attorney.
Well, you have to understand that for a long time, the eastern United States ruled the
dairy game. They had plenty of milk for all your milk-based needs: drinking, making milk
byproducts like butter, waterboarding the gingerbread man, and so on, but the Western
US wasn’t so lucky: they basically only had enough dairy cows to make drinking milk,
and none left over for dairy byproducts. But, like rock and roll, civil rights, and JFK
being not-assassinated, that changed in the 1960s, when the West started ramping up dairy
production. By 1975, California was the second leading dairy producer in the country, accounting
for 9.4% of all production—at least, according to a 30 page USDA report on US Milk Production
that I never imagined having to read when I uploaded a video about a really long drive
three years ago. That late growth of the Western dairy industry
is the key to understanding the fault in our but-tars. By the time the West had enough
milk to start making butter, the traditional Elgin machines that were used to print butter
on the East Coast were no longer available, and so West coast creameries ordered newer
equipment, which cut the butter into shorter, fatter sticks, called Western Stubbies—a
name so funny I can’t write a joke better than it. As time went on, people in different
areas got used to their different butter shapes. Today, butter companies like Land O’ Lakes
maintain two sets of butter printing machines, so that they can supply different butter sizes
to the East and West coasts. And there you have it: yet another butter mystery solved.
You know what’s the same size on both coasts, though? The size of Nebula and CuriosityStream’s
incredible content libraries. Nebula is, of course, the streaming site full of content
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to the great content, you’ll be helping support independent creators like me.
While this blew my mind, fortunately I still am able to maintain the "1 stick of butter equals 1/2 cup butter" notion as both sticks have the same amount of butter - just in different shapes
Butter is still sold in pound portions in Ireland. You can imagine my sheer surprise and shock when I visited the states to find little baby sticks of butter. I thought everything was supposed to be bigger in America. Disappointed and quite frankly disgusted by your bland tiny butter America!!!!
"Waterboarding the gingerbread man" has got to be one of the best sentences he's come up with yet
Illinois has both sizes and I wonder if it has something to do with production.
Also: wish the music on this one was not so loud, it's hard to hear Sam's voice.
Does anyone else recognise the background music, or is it just me?
Because nobody asked for it: http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/ref/MiltonEParker.pdf