Butter shortage in Norway as Christmas looms

The soaring popularity of a fat-rich fad diet has been blamed for depleting stocks of butter in Norway, creating a looming Christmas culinary crisis.

Norwegians have eaten up the country’s entire stockpile of butter partly as the result of a “low-carb” diet, which emphasizes a higher intake of fat, sweeping the Nordic nation.

With butter sold out in the shops, Thomas Willoch had to get butter by other means.

“When we visited Germany some days ago we bought butter,” he said.

Frode Rekve said she was at a loss to understand what was happening.

“I wish I was selling butter now because I am selling cheese, but everybody wants to buy butter. I don’t know what happened, but everybody wants to lose weight, eat butter and bacon, lose weight before Christmas, so they can eat more food for Christmas and even get thinner, I don’t know what’s going on really,” she said.

The shortage comes at a time when Norwegians usually eat plenty of buttery traditional biscuits and other homemade Christmas treats made with love and the liberal inclusion of dairy products.

Now this Christmas tradition is in danger.

A wet summer reduced the quality of animal feed and cut milk output by 25 million litres, limiting supplies.

The shortage has led some to suggest the world’s eighth-largest oil exporter offer some of its plentiful fuel supply in exchange for butter.

Lars Galtung, the head of communications at TINE, the country’s biggest farmer-owned cooperative, said sales suddenly soared by 20 percent in October and 30 percent in November.

“In Norway we have experienced this autumn that the milk production has been much lower than expected. On the demand side we have a very high increase on demand for butter, and the reasons for that is that the Norwegians have started to cook and make their food at homes more than before,” he explained.

“They are also not so afraid of fat as they were before and one reason for that is this low-carb diet trend that’s rolling across Europe,” Galtung added.

Butter is now selling on Norway’s top auction website,with a 250 gram piece starting at around 13 U.S. dollars, roughly four times its normal price.

Galtung regretted Norwegians would not be able to bake the traditional Christmas biscuits this year.

“We have to apologise for the Norwegians that in preparation for Christmas they make these Christmas cakes and so on, and butter is a very important ingredients in  that, and if you don’t have butter you cannot make those cakes,” he said.

The residents of the world’s second-richest per-capita country cannot even hope for help from a friendly neighbour who is rolling in butter.

Top dairy producer Denmark lies just across a narrow sea channel, but its stores of creamy butter will be kept out of the country by the high import duties of Norway, the only Nordic nation that does not belong to the European Union.