Butter Is Back

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Butter superfan Felicity Cloake asks whether the movement against ultra-processed foods is linked to a recent rise in popularity of her favourite kitchen staple. Her investigations take her to the rich grasslands of the West Country as she visits Wyke Farms, Quicke's and Ivy House Farm Dairy. She looks at how flavoured butter is taking off and finds out more about the tradition of cheesemakers making whey butter.

Professor Sarah Berry from King's College London gives advice on how much butter we should be eating as part of a healthy diet and food historian Regina Sexton looks at the relationship between butter and Ireland. Felicity also has a turn at making her own butter using an historic dash churn at The Butter Museum in Cork.

Presented by Felicity Cloake Produced in Bristol for BBC Audio by Robin Markwell The programme features a short excerpt of the song "Please Leave My Butter Alone" by Elsie Carlisle.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.
0:09.0	In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?
0:16.0	Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.
0:20.0	A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by
0:23.1	their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,
0:28.6	Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. You're about to listen to another episode of the food program.
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0:44.0	But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a whole week earlier than anywhere else.
0:50.3	First on BBC Sounds.
0:53.6	I love butter.
0:55.9	In my fridge at the moment, I have...
0:57.7	In fact, that's some butter just jumping out at me as I open the fridge
1:02.6	because I think it's fair to say that even for me,
1:06.0	I've got slightly too much butter in there at the moment.
1:08.8	Crammed into the door, I currently have... one, two, I have six types of butter.
1:15.8	Hello, my name is Felicity Cloak.
1:18.4	I'm a food journalist and writer, and I have a confession to make.
1:22.7	I'm a butter fanatic.
1:24.6	There's the unsalted bog standard supermarket butter that I have just picked up.
1:30.0	I've also got a couple of edible souvenirs.
1:32.6	If I go somewhere and the butter's really good, I try and bring some back if possible.
1:36.8	So I have the last of a huge block that I lugged back from Orkney earlier in the year.
	...

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