I Can't Believe There's No Butter

When I lived in America- the land of the plenty- the supermarket was fully stocked and I always came home with exactly what I needed. In Israel, things work a bit differently.

Israel is a small country so whatever is in the news will affect you, regardless of where you live. And while there may be differences in the climate- depending on if you live on the coast, or inland, in the hills or in the desert- one thing is constant. If there is a heat wave, you will feel it, anywhere you live. It is because of these reasons that there is currently a shortage of Israeli made butter.

This past summer was hot. No, that is an understatement; it was boiling, sweltering, unbearably, uncomfortably hot. It was so hot that the cows on the dairy farms did not produce as much milk as in years past. And since they produced less milk, there was less butter to be made.

I didn't really understand this phenomenon until a few months ago when I started having a hard time finding butter in the supermarket. Some days I could find it and other days it just wasn't on the shelves. Instead there was more margarine. A few more weeks go by and then it is never on the shelves. Another week and a notice appears from the management explaining a fact that everyone now knows- there is no butter.

So what does a country do when it cannot produce butter? It imports it of course. Now in the dairy section of the supermarket I can find butter from Denmark, from Ireland and from other parts of Europe. This butter is yellow, not white and about 3 times the price, but at least it is here.

When a food item as basic as butter just disappears from supermarket shelves, it reminds me how small Israel truly is. Here, national news is the same as local news, the entire weather and traffic update can be given in one breath and an intense heat wave can drastically alter dairy production.

Never a dull moment here…is that for sure.