CHICAGO — The National Butter Council released a two-page advisory Tuesday warning marketing departments that butter, while essential, will brown if left in the pan unattended, and that browned butter cannot be returned to its earlier state by any process currently known to food science or to content strategy.
The advisory arrives after what the Council described as a difficult year for the pan.
“Butter is wonderful. We are the Butter Council. We are, structurally, in favor of butter,” said Council spokesperson Marlene Ostrander, standing beside a skillet the organization has kept on medium heat since March as a demonstration. “What we are asking is that somebody occasionally look at the pan.”
The Council reports that the average marketing team now adds butter at the drafting stage, again at the editing stage, again during what one respondent called the optimization pass, and a fourth time in a step several teams were unable to name.
“They keep adding butter to butter,” Ostrander said. “At a certain point you are not making anything, you are just operating a stove.”
The browning timeline
According to the advisory, content passes through five recognized stages.
In the first, the butter melts and everything smells promising. Teams report high satisfaction here, volume increases, and meetings go well.
In the second, the butter foams. The advisory notes this is the last stage at which anyone typically checks the pan.
By the third stage small brown flecks appear, and Council researchers found that most teams interpret these flecks as flavor and respond by adding more butter.
The fourth stage the advisory declines to describe, citing reader distress.
The fifth stage is uniform brown. “Everything in the pan is the same color as everything else in the pan,” the advisory reads. “This is frequently reported to leadership as consistency.”
Industry response
Reached for comment, a marketing director at a mid-sized software company defended his team’s process while gesturing at a wall of dashboards.
“We are producing forty times what we produced last year,” he said. “Forty times. I want you to write that down.”
Asked whether anyone reads it, he paused.
“We are producing forty times what we produced last year,” he repeated.
The Council’s research found that browned content is detectable by ordinary readers at a rate approaching one hundred percent, a figure Ostrander called the least surprising number the organization has ever published.
“People know,” she said. “They have eaten food before.”
The recommendation
The advisory’s guidance runs three sentences and has already been criticized within the industry as insufficiently actionable.
It recommends a small amount of butter, applied early, and then removing the pan from the heat.
“Somebody has to take it off the burner, and that somebody is a person,” Ostrander said. “That has always been a person. The butter has never once taken itself off the burner, and I want to be very clear that it has had every opportunity.”
At press time, the Council confirmed the demonstration skillet had been running unattended since March and was now a solid object.
Fried Butter Daily is the satire desk at Content Cucumber. Everything on it is invented. The Butter Council is not real, Marlene Ostrander is not real, and the skillet is a metaphor, though by now it has earned some respect.
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