November 2, 2017 • 34 mins
The Protestant Reformation remains one of the most significant cultural events in the Western world. Martin Luther's 95 Theses addressed numerous concerns with the Catholic church, including corruption and the practice of granting dispensations -- allowing people to, essentially, pay their way out of sin. So what was it about butter that spurred Martin Luther into action? The story might surprise you.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to the show. Ladies and gentlemen. They call me Ben.
I can't believe it's not Boland, and my name is
Noel the butter lover Brown. Now that's good. I don't
don't ever call me that. I will not call you that.
If we're outside of the balance of this episode. Is
that fair? I guess so. Also, as it turns out,
(00:44):
our wonderful producer Alex pointed out right before we started rolling,
the butter lover was considered an insult in medieval Roman Catholicism. Yeah,
I'm Roman times to call someone butter lover? Was it
was fighting words, wasn't it. We got the nod from Alex. There,
(01:05):
this is ridiculous history, and today we are looking at
a very ridiculous but I would argue, very important part
of butter history. Yeah, and also part of the history
of religion as we know it. And it's ridiculous, I
guess because a big part of the Protestant Reformation, as
(01:29):
uh it turns out, was hinged on the prohibition of
that delicious, creamy substance we know and love, many of
us I do. How do you feel about butter? Butter? Yes,
I love it. I've had I've had many loves, hard
one and often lost in my life. Noel, and Butter
(01:51):
is Butter is the one that's going to stick around.
I think you're messing with me. I am not messing
with you. I am not messing with you. The it's true.
Everythinging that the illustrious Mr Brown said is true. And
this is somewhat timely for us because this year, the
year in which we're recording this marks the five anniversary
(02:14):
of the Protestant Reformation. And I mean, that's such a
staple of of high school history classes. But just in case,
well what was the Protestant Reformation? Ben, So, I'm so
glad you asked. So. It was a schism from the
Roman Catholic Church, and it was originally instituted by a
(02:34):
fellow named Martin Luther to the guy that nailed the
thing to the door. Yet he's the guy who famously
nailed feces onto the door in fifteen seventeen. So what
you're saying is he had thes and Butter was one. Yes, yes,
(02:55):
we are uh And I believe I believe that jay Z,
just I mean, is gonna guess that jay Z probably
based his song offs I was thinking that might be
the case. It has a feel, has that feel to it. Uh.
The problem that Martin Luther had to keep it in
a in a short format. Right. The problem that Martin
(03:17):
Luther had was that the way that Catholic Church was
functioning seen in his opinion in many ways as corrupt
and as oppressive, and he had his own theology that
conflicted with this. Right, I mean corrupt in the most
(03:39):
like Mafioss sense of the word corrupt. Essentially, the church
charged people um what they called indulgences in order to
go against Catholic doctrine or things that were prohibited food
items for example, or activities that were prohibited. You could
(04:00):
essentially pay for absolution. And this was clearly a huge
beef with Martin Luther. Because I have the pulled up
in Internet form and I typed in a search for
the word indulge. I didn't even make it all the
way to indulgence, and it appears forty five times um
(04:20):
in the document. And there were there were serious, fundamentally
contradictory theological opinions that Martin Luther had, or maybe beliefs
is a better word here. Uh. The indulgences, Yes, clearly
a corrupt practice. Right. He also challenged the authority of
(04:42):
the pope, and he believed that the Bible didn't have
to stay in the Latin language. He when he translated
the Bible to German, he honestly set that culture on
a path toward a standard written version of a German language.
Well totally mean, like a big part of it too,
(05:03):
beyond this weird practice of selling indulgences was making it
more accessible to people and not having to have everything
go through some sort of high church official or you know,
like the idea that you could speak directly to God
rather than have to have a go between some kind
of like medium almost in a way, in the form
(05:26):
of a priest, you know. And and Butter is not
just a tiny h Well look at that kind of
detail in this story. In fact, if not for this
band on Butter, there might have been a much slower
growth rate of the Protestant movement. So if we look
at this first, I guess the best way for us
(05:49):
to start is to consider fast days. Should we travel
back in time to medieval Europe. I think that's a
wonderful idea. So here we are midieval Europe. Dude, It's
kind of weird here. It's really dark and gloomy, and
(06:09):
everyone looks really bummed out. Yes, yes, yes, you'll you'll
also notice that there are a lot of people who
look hungry. Watch out for that poop. Oh you slipped,
that's fine, it's my poop. I was here earlier. Gross,
I know, I know, I was just really feeling the moment.
(06:29):
That skinny guy in the stocks over there, he looks
pretty malnourished. That's also plague, So I don't touch him.
I think I've driven this bit into the ground. Well,
luckily we're riding it out still, because now that we're
in this environment, we can note that there are some
obvious traditions that are different from our own in the
modern day. Right, Lucy, look at that? See that monk
(06:52):
man sure does have a shiny head. Yes, yes, he
has a ton shore ah my eyes, so what at?
That's a tansha is the word for that type of
haircut where they shave the top of their head. I
thought it was it called a bowl cut. It's it's
like the opposite of a bowl cut. It's like the
(07:13):
fringe around a bowl cut, minus the party. Okay, you
learned something new every day these monks that we're hypothetically
looking at are living in a system of fairly rigid
and exacting rules dictating both their um, their religious practices,
and their day to day behavior. And one of the
(07:34):
big things about this we're drawing a lot of this
from a book called Butter, A Rich History by Elaine
Coast Sulva. Uh. One of the big things about this
was the the sort of food you could eat. And
if it were a Wednesday, if it were a Friday
or a Saturday, then these monks the way this tradition
started could not eat any animal products. They were vegan
(07:58):
three days out of the week. They are really ahead
of a curve on that one, no kidding. And then
in lent the forty day period leading up to Easter,
they also couldn't eat animal products, so they were vegan
functionally for like forty days or their version of that. Yeah,
and what's wild and didn't occur to me until looking
into this stuff is it was accounted for something in
(08:18):
the neighborhood of like half of the calendar year, added
it all up together, and that's if you don't well,
we'll get to indulgences and how they play in here.
But yeah, You're absolutely right. That really adds up, and
that makes me appreciate every filly cheese steak I have
ever eaten or will ever eat. Do you do that
(08:39):
the cheese whiz version? You know, I'm not loyal enough.
That's the classic? They say, Yeah, but I like the provolon,
you know, like a good provolonge. You ever eaten cheese
whiz out of the can? Yeah? Man, Yeah, We've all
had dark times in our lives, right, I mean, I'll
do whip cream out of the can. But cheese whiz
is just like, it's not it's not a food. It's
not a food. It's essentially like the powder that comes
(08:59):
in the crow macaroni and cheese boxes, just like an
aerosol form. Don't they have to call the cheese food product?
I think so American cheese slices. But the thing that's
cool too about this is, um, a lot of this
stuff really hinged on region. We take for granted the
idea of importing and exporting and are the availability of
like anything, and like we don't really have to limit
(09:20):
our food intake based on where we live. If we
want strawberries, we can get strawberries. If we want some
you know, tropical fruit that's not grown anywhere near us.
We can get it because of like you know, refrigeration.
But back in these days that was not a thing,
and your diet was dictated pretty much exclusively on what
was available in your region unless you were super wealthy,
(09:44):
and even and even then it would be incredibly rare,
you know, or be incredibly expensive, for instance, to get
certain spices like peppercorns. So now we've got we've got
our monks who about half the year just can't eat
meat or dairy and is also coincidentally believed to fuel lust.
(10:07):
Any animal product is thought as like essentially an aphrodisiactive sorts.
This tradition became becomes intensely problematic when the Catholic Church
extends these fast Day rules to all Christians. So for
not just monks, anybody who is a Christian has to
(10:29):
skip meat, milk, eggs, animal fats or butter on Wednesday's, Friday's, Saturdays,
and all during Lent. And this is where we really
see the problem of geography that we mentioned coming into play,
because the Roman Catholic Church isn't is it in Southern Europe, right,
It's based in Rome. It's in charge ideologically of a
(10:52):
lot of Europe, but it's based in Rome, and they
had access to like fish, a lot more fish, you know,
fresh fish, and also things like olive oil that were
alternatives to butter, because butter, you know, as as we know,
is delicious to just spread directly on things, but it's
also a really great way to cook things, and it
(11:13):
infuses pretty excellent flavor into things that you cook with it.
Olive oil is also fantastic, I would argue, it doesn't
quite add the same you know, some kind of mom
kind of you mommy same kind of kick as butter does.
So that played into this as well. Southern Europeans were
(11:36):
not only not only was olive oil sort of functioning
the way that butter functioned in different areas of Europe,
but olive oil was considered superior and Southern some Southern
Europeans actually had prejudices against butter, really really strange stuff.
(11:57):
There was this belief that you know, butter was disease vector,
that the reason people got leprosy was because of their
buttered consumption. And so when Southern Europeans were traveling abroad,
some would even bring their own supply of oil. You know,
like I don't want to come back to Rome with leprosy.
(12:17):
So pack of pack of mule full of olive oil
or put bags on the mule. Don't put the oil
in the mule. I mean unless it's you know, starting
to rust. Yes, sure, I mechanical mules. I don't know
what I'm talking about. Cut all of this, but don't
(12:38):
leave it in. It's fine, We're just having a conversation here.
So Southern europeans all about olive oil, olive oil, maybe
fish oil. These are the superior flavor ingredients, right, These
are the superior um products in comparison to butter. But
in parts of Europe where there were dairy farming countries
(13:02):
like France or where Martin Luther lived Germany, cutting butter
from the diet was a huge deal and it was dangerous.
It was tantamount to some form of forced starvation essentially
m because think about it, if they can't consume any
meat or then also cheese, right, cheese would be out.
(13:24):
Then they couldn't rely on butter. Things were getting really
really skimpy in the pantry and the larder, and this
rule was applied in a very corrupt way. This is
where indulgences come in. And did you read about these
when you were a kid in school? Man, this sounds
(13:45):
like the most crooked, disturbing practice. Well, it's like the
it's it's it's you know, a religious equivalent of like
Polly Walnuts from the Sopranos knocking on your door and
you know, expecting his collections for protection, you know, but
this is like spiritual protection. Let's basically saying, you know,
you you grease my palm a little bit, and I'll
(14:06):
give you a pass. In other words, I won't break
your legs or you know, put you in the stocks
when we find out that you've broken fast by eating
you know, something that was prohibited like butter. Yeah, it's
it's crazy. So if you are well connected Catholic royalty,
or if you're a wealthy merchant, for instance, and you're
saying the common people maybe all well and good three
(14:30):
days out of the week without button, but I am
of different stock, have every single one, they'll sounded like
Winston Churchill, including the children. Oh that's terrifying. I forgot.
We're there actually right now. Still we we haven't come
back from our time traveling. Yeah, figure out what day
(14:53):
of the week it is so we don't get in
trouble because you know, this is a spiritual institution. We
are talking about a religious rule, and this means that
in addition to physical penalties that might exist, you know,
if their physical penalties for breaking a religious rule, the
ultimate threat is that you can you are spiritually committing
(15:18):
a transgression against the will of God. And the thing
too is in these regions where they didn't have ready
access to the alternatives to butter, there were merchants that
would capitalize on that and would provide or import I
guess really really really poor quality oils. And there's actually
a quote from a book by the name of Fast
(15:41):
and Feast from a um priest from fifteen twenty that
goes as as such. In Rome, they make a mockery
of fasting while forcing us to eat an oil they
themselves would not use to grease their shoes. Then they
sell us the right to eat the foods forbidden on
fast days, but they have stolen that same liberty from
(16:04):
us with their ecclesiastical laws. Eating butter, they say, is
a greater sin than to lie, blaspheme, or indulge in impurity,
which is just insane when you think about it, you
know that that list of priorities could be so messed up.
And it's it's not just a matter of controlling a population, right,
(16:31):
it's a matter of economic import for the for the
Catholic Church, because they're taking this money that people are
paying for dispensations, right. Uh. And they had different rates,
and they had sometimes they had groups paying like a
community paying for a dispensation. They're using the cash these
(16:53):
folks are paying them too construct bigger buildings, you know, uh,
and to fund crusades. And there are even there there
are even things that the local population still recognizes about
this practice. Right. There was a special collection box in
(17:14):
French parishes to collect what was called butter money. Right,
So these entire communities where it's told you can eat butter. Dude,
that sounds like a mafia term. When you get that
butter money, a little bit of butter money, you know,
forget about it. That's not my best that Now everybody's
looking around at that terrible accident, and we apologize to
(17:36):
any Italian Americans out there that Ben is deeply offended. No,
that was not Italian American. It was just it was
you yeah, like uh like you know, forget about it, Brooklyn, Jersey.
That's fair, that's fair. Oh boy, well, who knew that
butter can be so controversy? Right? Who knew? Who knew?
(17:59):
We We knew, we we we read, we read up
on this point. We knew earlier that's going. So in
this case, it's not somebody saying, Okay, I know that
butter is banned on Wednesdays, but We're having a big
wedding at my castle and I'd like to serve butter
to you know, the people attending the wedding. This case,
(18:22):
there are these entire regions who just continue to pay
an extra tax for the right to conveniently ignore a rule. Yeah,
or even like like you said, royalty or you know,
very privileged members of society could pay the tax for
like their entire household. Yeah, yeah, they could. They could
(18:43):
do it as a you know, like a group rate.
I wonder if they got a price break, you know,
I wonder if if members of the church would say, well,
for you by yourself, it's X amount of stuff, but
you get a couple of get a couple of units
off for every family member you add. They probably didn't
do price breaks, sort of like buying group passes to
like Disneyland or something like like a cell phone plan.
(19:06):
This is almost like a cell phone plan because you
have to keep paying a cable bundle or a cable bundle. Basically,
the Roman Catholic Church was like the comcast of the
medieval ar in this you know what that is accurate
to a frightening degree in in this case, officially and
locals even today would call certain buildings like butter towers.
(19:29):
You know that the money was used to build these
gigantic religious uh well to add expansions on or to
build these gigantic religious structures. This struck Martin Luther, along
with all the other problems you had. This struck him
as tremendously insulting because you know, Noel, we're walking around
(19:52):
in the past. Our clothes look probably really cool, I
would hope, although our hat game is nowhere near as
evolved as the Middle Ages hat game. But we we
don't have any money in this area of time. So
if we're in this community, if we like sat down
(20:14):
and lived here and we didn't have money to pay
for that dispensation, then we're getting swindled by people selling
garbage oil. Right, that might not even be edible. There's
no way around this butter band for us. So what
what are we what are we supposed to do? You know? Yeah,
(20:35):
And just just to backtrack just slightly, I found an
example of one of these kind of blanket dispensations in
and this is from the The Butter Book, A rich history.
Queen Anne, who was the Duchess of Brittany, um got
Rome to give her a dispensation for not only herself
but the entire household, including all her servants and family members.
(20:59):
And Brittany did not produce any cooking oil at all.
It was a it was a butter based economy, I
guess for lack of a better time. But it's interesting
because the this dispensation was ultimately extended to all of Brittany,
and this kind of started, um, the the undoing of
(21:24):
some of this gradually. Um. But it didn't come for free,
because they had to still give to the church and
there were even special prayers that they had to do. Yes,
I contrite confession, it's not it's technically it's not enough
to just give them the money and say let me
(21:46):
let me snarf my butter in peace. Technically they have
to make a contrite confession where they are legitimately apologizing,
confessing to receive the apps solution from sin. And that's
where those butter boxes came from, that we were talking
about in churches where you would pay this spiritual tax
(22:08):
in some of these French parishes, and they actually paid
for the construction of like these ornate cathedrals, and one
of them, in um Ruin and borges Um was dubbed
the Tower, the butter Tower or the tour Debure. Yeah,
so we can see, we can see how this becomes
(22:34):
a an active segments of the regional economies. Right, and
this whether or not I mean, obviously we see we
look back and we see the process of granting indulgences
as corrupt. Right, But if it is the practice of
(22:57):
the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is making the rules,
then they're the ones who decide if something is corrupt,
it would logically follow. However, Luther, in an open letter
to the Christian nobility of the German nation, said that
this was an enormous problem, that these clergymen should not
(23:19):
be traveling around Germany telling people two pay money and
say they're sorry before they can eat the butter that
they already made. They already may be paid for right,
they already churned themselves. The religious institution was not involved
in the creation of the butter. We just had to
(23:43):
pay them. And this practice, which was seen as selling forgiveness,
became very, very widespread. And I loved this. I loved
this phrase. And then we talked about a little bit
off air. Professor of Lutheran History Theology of Pacific Lutheran
Theological Seminary called it this. That's Dr Kircy Sturna an
(24:08):
economy of grace. Yeah, that's pretty pretty great image. And
there's a quote from Professor Sturno says, today we buy
life insurance and health insurance to secure our possessions. In
the Middle Ages, the only security came through church. These
indulgences were the people's insurance policies, tangible pieces of paper
that said, hey, I'm good, get out of health free exactly.
(24:31):
But as we've been saying, for Luther, these clergies selling
indulgences represented just kind of totally exposed what he saw
as kind of the rot within the Roman Catholic Church
that convinced poor peasants that they could be forgiven for
a price, and in Luther's particular theology, um forgiveness was
(24:55):
free and you could be saved by faith alone and
grace alone, and it did not have to follow this
you know, bizarre pyramids scheme of like paying for forgiveness,
which you know, I mean it totally cheapens it if
you're thinking about it, like objectively, right, especially when consider
uh different parts uh different passages of the Bible which
(25:20):
talk about the dangers of the dangers have counted on wealth. Right.
This leads us to an interesting parallel. Is it a
coincidence that most of the dairy rich countries that were
producing and using butter at the time were the same
nations that broke away from the Catholic Church in the
(25:42):
sixteenth century. Man, butter is delicious, and you know where
they clearly needed it. Yeah. There's there's no old quotation
that I remember reading that says every the paraphrase something
along the lines of like every nation is uh seven
days away from revolution if they're not eating. Because food
(26:07):
is one of these fundamental motivators. When we're talking about
people who live in a staple food economy, these are
not people who had As we mentioned earlier, this vast
variety of food they could eat for fun, you know, well,
and and and I know, I keep joking about the
deliciousness that is butter, and that's you know, surely some
(26:29):
part of it. But this was something that they needed
to properly cook their food and you know, make it
easier to digest and to be nourished by you know.
I mean, if if they were cooking vegetables, it's not
a whole lot of fun eating raw vegetables, you know.
I mean, you want to do a nice little stir
fry or something, and the butter gives you what you
(26:49):
need to do that if you don't have access to
cooking oils. This leads to what Professor Stirner calls one
of Luther's biggest teachings. Nothing of eating, drinking, sleeping, marrying,
or sex is sin. Not believing in God is sin.
That's a quote from That's a quote from the professor
and then sums it up this way. And I love
(27:10):
how approachable this professor's languages. And he's the one who says,
we're good. Yeah, same professor, she says. In other words,
everything is cool. Eating butter is cool. One of the
reasons why the Reformation was so successful. It was that
Luther radically changed how people thought about what's wrong and
what's permissible, and so in a very real way, something
(27:34):
that seems simple to us today, something simple as when
you are allowed to eat butter. In part, lad Martin
Luther to march up on October thirty one and fifteen
seventeen and publish his n theses. Uh. And the door
that we were referring to the way, the way the
(27:55):
story slash legend goes is that he nailed it to
a church door in his hometown of Wittenberg. And these,
you know, the whole crux of Theses was to call
into question fundamentally, you know, the idea of the pope
(28:17):
being essentially godlike, and you know, specifically this idea of
God being completely removed from the average man and woman
and their ability to communicate directly with God through prayer. Yes, absolutely,
And the printing press also emerges on the scene, which
(28:39):
means these teachings spread rapidly in today as we record this,
there are more than forty thousand Protestant denominations across the globe.
I mean, Theses was like, you know, the first meme
that's not bad it's pretty bad. A lot of memes, though,
I think everything your exactly meme classifications aside, this is
(29:04):
pretty profound to think that butter of all things and
change the could change the world. And I wonder if
people ever, if people ever think about that when they're
the next time, you know, they're in church, or they
go to a youth group where they oh. And I
do have to point out Martin Luther was not by
any measure a a perfect man, but in this case,
(29:29):
he did something amazing and it's fascinating. You know, if
you if you were listening to this and you identify
as Protestant, uh, give it, give it a think and
check out butter rich History to learn more about this strange, fascinating,
oftentimes invisible and profound ways in which this food stuff
(29:51):
affects you. What'st thou like the taste of butter? Man,
I'm so glad we say that reference for the end anybody, anybody,
which everybody but I was looking into it as well,
and I didn't think about this until we were researching this.
But the family that's portrayed in that film are Protestants,
(30:12):
but they're like even more extreme versions of Protestants. That
I want to just completely extricate everything associated with the
Catholic Church. And uh, there's a fantastic moment where butter
comes up as being almost like the most sinful indulgence.
So that's still stuck around even through Protestantism, although it
(30:33):
certainly wasn't like being taxed or in that way. Oh
that's a brilliant connection. Well done. I didn't think about that.
But what do you think about that? Is that is
that accurate? I don't know. I think I I think
it's intentional. I will go on the record saying anything
it's intentional because I was always these were Puritans in
the film. I was always wrapped up in the concept
(30:54):
of the clever word play of You know, we had
talked about this when we're hanging out earlier, not just
the because folks we fan boyd over this film so hard. Uh,
it was all we talked about for several weeks. And
I am so surprised that I missed that. And thank
you for telling me, because I dwelt on the concept
(31:16):
of not butter, the taste of butter. It's like the
pursuit of happiness, right. Um, But now I'm I'm going
to go back and watch the Witch, and I might
just do it eating a stick of butter. It's such
a thing as too much of a good thing. Well,
we're gonna find out firsthand. I'm I'm mostly kidding. I
(31:37):
have never to my analedge eating an entire stick of butter.
Give her a deep fried butter at carnivals. That's a
thing I have, but I haven't tried it. Did you
ever give it a show? Dude? No, too much of
a good thing? It just seems really weird. I feel
like butter is an ingredient and not its own snack. It. Well, mean,
it's like it's good on a piece of toast for sure,
which essentially is me. Come on, let's be real, eating
(31:58):
a piece of toast with butter on it. It's a
vehicle for butter. It's true. There's a there's a lot
of stuff, like some people dreat popcorn, is a vehicle
for butter. Well, you guys out there, tell us how
you like to eat butter. Do you like to deep
fry it? Do you like to just eat it with
a spoon? You know, what's your favorite? What about clarified butter?
We didn't There's so many things, but what am I doing?
(32:20):
What am I doing? We need to we need to
plug our friend Lauren and Annie's podcast, food Stuff. They
have a series of episodes on the history of butter
um and they also have a video that's pretty cool
called get Some Culture. Butter The tea is in parentheses,
So check out food Stuff. It's another house stuff works
(32:41):
podcast and they're they're friends of ours, so they're cool
and you should listen to them. Yes, yes, indeed, and
that will be just the beginning of your food science journey.
And this concludes our episode for today. We are going
to return, but as we said earlier, in the meantime,
we want to hear what you think, and I'd love
to hear about other foods that fundamentally changed the world.
(33:05):
You can let us know at our email address. We
are ridiculous at how stuff works dot com and hey,
we're all over the internet to yeah, we have real
stuff now. We've been just kind of like haphazardly, um,
you know, just saying search for us online, But no,
we have things now. We've got Instagram dot com slash
ridiculous History and Facebook dot com slash ridiculous History. And I,
(33:27):
if I'm being really probably would have figured that out
on your own, because you're all smart, scrappy people, and
we really appreciate you listening to this show and smooth like.
But we'll see again real soon
Welcome to the show. Ladies and gentlemen. They call me Ben.
I can't believe it's not Boland, and my name is
Noel the butter lover Brown. Now that's good. I don't
don't ever call me that. I will not call you that.
If we're outside of the balance of this episode. Is
that fair? I guess so. Also, as it turns out,
(00:44):
our wonderful producer Alex pointed out right before we started rolling,
the butter lover was considered an insult in medieval Roman Catholicism. Yeah,
I'm Roman times to call someone butter lover? Was it
was fighting words, wasn't it. We got the nod from Alex. There,
(01:05):
this is ridiculous history, and today we are looking at
a very ridiculous but I would argue, very important part
of butter history. Yeah, and also part of the history
of religion as we know it. And it's ridiculous, I
guess because a big part of the Protestant Reformation, as
(01:29):
uh it turns out, was hinged on the prohibition of
that delicious, creamy substance we know and love, many of
us I do. How do you feel about butter? Butter? Yes,
I love it. I've had I've had many loves, hard
one and often lost in my life. Noel, and Butter
(01:51):
is Butter is the one that's going to stick around.
I think you're messing with me. I am not messing
with you. I am not messing with you. The it's true.
Everythinging that the illustrious Mr Brown said is true. And
this is somewhat timely for us because this year, the
year in which we're recording this marks the five anniversary
(02:14):
of the Protestant Reformation. And I mean, that's such a
staple of of high school history classes. But just in case,
well what was the Protestant Reformation? Ben, So, I'm so
glad you asked. So. It was a schism from the
Roman Catholic Church, and it was originally instituted by a
(02:34):
fellow named Martin Luther to the guy that nailed the
thing to the door. Yet he's the guy who famously
nailed feces onto the door in fifteen seventeen. So what
you're saying is he had thes and Butter was one. Yes, yes,
(02:55):
we are uh And I believe I believe that jay Z,
just I mean, is gonna guess that jay Z probably
based his song offs I was thinking that might be
the case. It has a feel, has that feel to it. Uh.
The problem that Martin Luther had to keep it in
a in a short format. Right. The problem that Martin
(03:17):
Luther had was that the way that Catholic Church was
functioning seen in his opinion in many ways as corrupt
and as oppressive, and he had his own theology that
conflicted with this. Right, I mean corrupt in the most
(03:39):
like Mafioss sense of the word corrupt. Essentially, the church
charged people um what they called indulgences in order to
go against Catholic doctrine or things that were prohibited food
items for example, or activities that were prohibited. You could
(04:00):
essentially pay for absolution. And this was clearly a huge
beef with Martin Luther. Because I have the pulled up
in Internet form and I typed in a search for
the word indulge. I didn't even make it all the
way to indulgence, and it appears forty five times um
(04:20):
in the document. And there were there were serious, fundamentally
contradictory theological opinions that Martin Luther had, or maybe beliefs
is a better word here. Uh. The indulgences, Yes, clearly
a corrupt practice. Right. He also challenged the authority of
(04:42):
the pope, and he believed that the Bible didn't have
to stay in the Latin language. He when he translated
the Bible to German, he honestly set that culture on
a path toward a standard written version of a German language.
Well totally mean, like a big part of it too,
(05:03):
beyond this weird practice of selling indulgences was making it
more accessible to people and not having to have everything
go through some sort of high church official or you know,
like the idea that you could speak directly to God
rather than have to have a go between some kind
of like medium almost in a way, in the form
(05:26):
of a priest, you know. And and Butter is not
just a tiny h Well look at that kind of
detail in this story. In fact, if not for this
band on Butter, there might have been a much slower
growth rate of the Protestant movement. So if we look
at this first, I guess the best way for us
(05:49):
to start is to consider fast days. Should we travel
back in time to medieval Europe. I think that's a
wonderful idea. So here we are midieval Europe. Dude, It's
kind of weird here. It's really dark and gloomy, and
(06:09):
everyone looks really bummed out. Yes, yes, yes, you'll you'll
also notice that there are a lot of people who
look hungry. Watch out for that poop. Oh you slipped,
that's fine, it's my poop. I was here earlier. Gross,
I know, I know, I was just really feeling the moment.
(06:29):
That skinny guy in the stocks over there, he looks
pretty malnourished. That's also plague, So I don't touch him.
I think I've driven this bit into the ground. Well,
luckily we're riding it out still, because now that we're
in this environment, we can note that there are some
obvious traditions that are different from our own in the
modern day. Right, Lucy, look at that? See that monk
(06:52):
man sure does have a shiny head. Yes, yes, he
has a ton shore ah my eyes, so what at?
That's a tansha is the word for that type of
haircut where they shave the top of their head. I
thought it was it called a bowl cut. It's it's
like the opposite of a bowl cut. It's like the
(07:13):
fringe around a bowl cut, minus the party. Okay, you
learned something new every day these monks that we're hypothetically
looking at are living in a system of fairly rigid
and exacting rules dictating both their um, their religious practices,
and their day to day behavior. And one of the
(07:34):
big things about this we're drawing a lot of this
from a book called Butter, A Rich History by Elaine
Coast Sulva. Uh. One of the big things about this
was the the sort of food you could eat. And
if it were a Wednesday, if it were a Friday
or a Saturday, then these monks the way this tradition
started could not eat any animal products. They were vegan
(07:58):
three days out of the week. They are really ahead
of a curve on that one, no kidding. And then
in lent the forty day period leading up to Easter,
they also couldn't eat animal products, so they were vegan
functionally for like forty days or their version of that. Yeah,
and what's wild and didn't occur to me until looking
into this stuff is it was accounted for something in
(08:18):
the neighborhood of like half of the calendar year, added
it all up together, and that's if you don't well,
we'll get to indulgences and how they play in here.
But yeah, You're absolutely right. That really adds up, and
that makes me appreciate every filly cheese steak I have
ever eaten or will ever eat. Do you do that
(08:39):
the cheese whiz version? You know, I'm not loyal enough.
That's the classic? They say, Yeah, but I like the provolon,
you know, like a good provolonge. You ever eaten cheese
whiz out of the can? Yeah? Man, Yeah, We've all
had dark times in our lives, right, I mean, I'll
do whip cream out of the can. But cheese whiz
is just like, it's not it's not a food. It's
not a food. It's essentially like the powder that comes
(08:59):
in the crow macaroni and cheese boxes, just like an
aerosol form. Don't they have to call the cheese food product?
I think so American cheese slices. But the thing that's
cool too about this is, um, a lot of this
stuff really hinged on region. We take for granted the
idea of importing and exporting and are the availability of
like anything, and like we don't really have to limit
(09:20):
our food intake based on where we live. If we
want strawberries, we can get strawberries. If we want some
you know, tropical fruit that's not grown anywhere near us.
We can get it because of like you know, refrigeration.
But back in these days that was not a thing,
and your diet was dictated pretty much exclusively on what
was available in your region unless you were super wealthy,
(09:44):
and even and even then it would be incredibly rare,
you know, or be incredibly expensive, for instance, to get
certain spices like peppercorns. So now we've got we've got
our monks who about half the year just can't eat
meat or dairy and is also coincidentally believed to fuel lust.
(10:07):
Any animal product is thought as like essentially an aphrodisiactive sorts.
This tradition became becomes intensely problematic when the Catholic Church
extends these fast Day rules to all Christians. So for
not just monks, anybody who is a Christian has to
(10:29):
skip meat, milk, eggs, animal fats or butter on Wednesday's, Friday's, Saturdays,
and all during Lent. And this is where we really
see the problem of geography that we mentioned coming into play,
because the Roman Catholic Church isn't is it in Southern Europe, right,
It's based in Rome. It's in charge ideologically of a
(10:52):
lot of Europe, but it's based in Rome, and they
had access to like fish, a lot more fish, you know,
fresh fish, and also things like olive oil that were
alternatives to butter, because butter, you know, as as we know,
is delicious to just spread directly on things, but it's
also a really great way to cook things, and it
(11:13):
infuses pretty excellent flavor into things that you cook with it.
Olive oil is also fantastic, I would argue, it doesn't
quite add the same you know, some kind of mom
kind of you mommy same kind of kick as butter does.
So that played into this as well. Southern Europeans were
(11:36):
not only not only was olive oil sort of functioning
the way that butter functioned in different areas of Europe,
but olive oil was considered superior and Southern some Southern
Europeans actually had prejudices against butter, really really strange stuff.
(11:57):
There was this belief that you know, butter was disease vector,
that the reason people got leprosy was because of their
buttered consumption. And so when Southern Europeans were traveling abroad,
some would even bring their own supply of oil. You know,
like I don't want to come back to Rome with leprosy.
(12:17):
So pack of pack of mule full of olive oil
or put bags on the mule. Don't put the oil
in the mule. I mean unless it's you know, starting
to rust. Yes, sure, I mechanical mules. I don't know
what I'm talking about. Cut all of this, but don't
(12:38):
leave it in. It's fine, We're just having a conversation here.
So Southern europeans all about olive oil, olive oil, maybe
fish oil. These are the superior flavor ingredients, right, These
are the superior um products in comparison to butter. But
in parts of Europe where there were dairy farming countries
(13:02):
like France or where Martin Luther lived Germany, cutting butter
from the diet was a huge deal and it was dangerous.
It was tantamount to some form of forced starvation essentially
m because think about it, if they can't consume any
meat or then also cheese, right, cheese would be out.
(13:24):
Then they couldn't rely on butter. Things were getting really
really skimpy in the pantry and the larder, and this
rule was applied in a very corrupt way. This is
where indulgences come in. And did you read about these
when you were a kid in school? Man, this sounds
(13:45):
like the most crooked, disturbing practice. Well, it's like the
it's it's it's you know, a religious equivalent of like
Polly Walnuts from the Sopranos knocking on your door and
you know, expecting his collections for protection, you know, but
this is like spiritual protection. Let's basically saying, you know,
you you grease my palm a little bit, and I'll
(14:06):
give you a pass. In other words, I won't break
your legs or you know, put you in the stocks
when we find out that you've broken fast by eating
you know, something that was prohibited like butter. Yeah, it's
it's crazy. So if you are well connected Catholic royalty,
or if you're a wealthy merchant, for instance, and you're
saying the common people maybe all well and good three
(14:30):
days out of the week without button, but I am
of different stock, have every single one, they'll sounded like
Winston Churchill, including the children. Oh that's terrifying. I forgot.
We're there actually right now. Still we we haven't come
back from our time traveling. Yeah, figure out what day
(14:53):
of the week it is so we don't get in
trouble because you know, this is a spiritual institution. We
are talking about a religious rule, and this means that
in addition to physical penalties that might exist, you know,
if their physical penalties for breaking a religious rule, the
ultimate threat is that you can you are spiritually committing
(15:18):
a transgression against the will of God. And the thing
too is in these regions where they didn't have ready
access to the alternatives to butter, there were merchants that
would capitalize on that and would provide or import I
guess really really really poor quality oils. And there's actually
a quote from a book by the name of Fast
(15:41):
and Feast from a um priest from fifteen twenty that
goes as as such. In Rome, they make a mockery
of fasting while forcing us to eat an oil they
themselves would not use to grease their shoes. Then they
sell us the right to eat the foods forbidden on
fast days, but they have stolen that same liberty from
(16:04):
us with their ecclesiastical laws. Eating butter, they say, is
a greater sin than to lie, blaspheme, or indulge in impurity,
which is just insane when you think about it, you
know that that list of priorities could be so messed up.
And it's it's not just a matter of controlling a population, right,
(16:31):
it's a matter of economic import for the for the
Catholic Church, because they're taking this money that people are
paying for dispensations, right. Uh. And they had different rates,
and they had sometimes they had groups paying like a
community paying for a dispensation. They're using the cash these
(16:53):
folks are paying them too construct bigger buildings, you know, uh,
and to fund crusades. And there are even there there
are even things that the local population still recognizes about
this practice. Right. There was a special collection box in
(17:14):
French parishes to collect what was called butter money. Right,
So these entire communities where it's told you can eat butter. Dude,
that sounds like a mafia term. When you get that
butter money, a little bit of butter money, you know,
forget about it. That's not my best that Now everybody's
looking around at that terrible accident, and we apologize to
(17:36):
any Italian Americans out there that Ben is deeply offended. No,
that was not Italian American. It was just it was
you yeah, like uh like you know, forget about it, Brooklyn, Jersey.
That's fair, that's fair. Oh boy, well, who knew that
butter can be so controversy? Right? Who knew? Who knew?
(17:59):
We We knew, we we we read, we read up
on this point. We knew earlier that's going. So in
this case, it's not somebody saying, Okay, I know that
butter is banned on Wednesdays, but We're having a big
wedding at my castle and I'd like to serve butter
to you know, the people attending the wedding. This case,
(18:22):
there are these entire regions who just continue to pay
an extra tax for the right to conveniently ignore a rule. Yeah,
or even like like you said, royalty or you know,
very privileged members of society could pay the tax for
like their entire household. Yeah, yeah, they could. They could
(18:43):
do it as a you know, like a group rate.
I wonder if they got a price break, you know,
I wonder if if members of the church would say, well,
for you by yourself, it's X amount of stuff, but
you get a couple of get a couple of units
off for every family member you add. They probably didn't
do price breaks, sort of like buying group passes to
like Disneyland or something like like a cell phone plan.
(19:06):
This is almost like a cell phone plan because you
have to keep paying a cable bundle or a cable bundle. Basically,
the Roman Catholic Church was like the comcast of the
medieval ar in this you know what that is accurate
to a frightening degree in in this case, officially and
locals even today would call certain buildings like butter towers.
(19:29):
You know that the money was used to build these
gigantic religious uh well to add expansions on or to
build these gigantic religious structures. This struck Martin Luther, along
with all the other problems you had. This struck him
as tremendously insulting because you know, Noel, we're walking around
(19:52):
in the past. Our clothes look probably really cool, I
would hope, although our hat game is nowhere near as
evolved as the Middle Ages hat game. But we we
don't have any money in this area of time. So
if we're in this community, if we like sat down
(20:14):
and lived here and we didn't have money to pay
for that dispensation, then we're getting swindled by people selling
garbage oil. Right, that might not even be edible. There's
no way around this butter band for us. So what
what are we what are we supposed to do? You know? Yeah,
(20:35):
And just just to backtrack just slightly, I found an
example of one of these kind of blanket dispensations in
and this is from the The Butter Book, A rich history.
Queen Anne, who was the Duchess of Brittany, um got
Rome to give her a dispensation for not only herself
but the entire household, including all her servants and family members.
(20:59):
And Brittany did not produce any cooking oil at all.
It was a it was a butter based economy, I
guess for lack of a better time. But it's interesting
because the this dispensation was ultimately extended to all of Brittany,
and this kind of started, um, the the undoing of
(21:24):
some of this gradually. Um. But it didn't come for free,
because they had to still give to the church and
there were even special prayers that they had to do. Yes,
I contrite confession, it's not it's technically it's not enough
to just give them the money and say let me
(21:46):
let me snarf my butter in peace. Technically they have
to make a contrite confession where they are legitimately apologizing,
confessing to receive the apps solution from sin. And that's
where those butter boxes came from, that we were talking
about in churches where you would pay this spiritual tax
(22:08):
in some of these French parishes, and they actually paid
for the construction of like these ornate cathedrals, and one
of them, in um Ruin and borges Um was dubbed
the Tower, the butter Tower or the tour Debure. Yeah,
so we can see, we can see how this becomes
(22:34):
a an active segments of the regional economies. Right, and
this whether or not I mean, obviously we see we
look back and we see the process of granting indulgences
as corrupt. Right, But if it is the practice of
(22:57):
the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is making the rules,
then they're the ones who decide if something is corrupt,
it would logically follow. However, Luther, in an open letter
to the Christian nobility of the German nation, said that
this was an enormous problem, that these clergymen should not
(23:19):
be traveling around Germany telling people two pay money and
say they're sorry before they can eat the butter that
they already made. They already may be paid for right,
they already churned themselves. The religious institution was not involved
in the creation of the butter. We just had to
(23:43):
pay them. And this practice, which was seen as selling forgiveness,
became very, very widespread. And I loved this. I loved
this phrase. And then we talked about a little bit
off air. Professor of Lutheran History Theology of Pacific Lutheran
Theological Seminary called it this. That's Dr Kircy Sturna an
(24:08):
economy of grace. Yeah, that's pretty pretty great image. And
there's a quote from Professor Sturno says, today we buy
life insurance and health insurance to secure our possessions. In
the Middle Ages, the only security came through church. These
indulgences were the people's insurance policies, tangible pieces of paper
that said, hey, I'm good, get out of health free exactly.
(24:31):
But as we've been saying, for Luther, these clergies selling
indulgences represented just kind of totally exposed what he saw
as kind of the rot within the Roman Catholic Church
that convinced poor peasants that they could be forgiven for
a price, and in Luther's particular theology, um forgiveness was
(24:55):
free and you could be saved by faith alone and
grace alone, and it did not have to follow this
you know, bizarre pyramids scheme of like paying for forgiveness,
which you know, I mean it totally cheapens it if
you're thinking about it, like objectively, right, especially when consider
uh different parts uh different passages of the Bible which
(25:20):
talk about the dangers of the dangers have counted on wealth. Right.
This leads us to an interesting parallel. Is it a
coincidence that most of the dairy rich countries that were
producing and using butter at the time were the same
nations that broke away from the Catholic Church in the
(25:42):
sixteenth century. Man, butter is delicious, and you know where
they clearly needed it. Yeah. There's there's no old quotation
that I remember reading that says every the paraphrase something
along the lines of like every nation is uh seven
days away from revolution if they're not eating. Because food
(26:07):
is one of these fundamental motivators. When we're talking about
people who live in a staple food economy, these are
not people who had As we mentioned earlier, this vast
variety of food they could eat for fun, you know, well,
and and and I know, I keep joking about the
deliciousness that is butter, and that's you know, surely some
(26:29):
part of it. But this was something that they needed
to properly cook their food and you know, make it
easier to digest and to be nourished by you know.
I mean, if if they were cooking vegetables, it's not
a whole lot of fun eating raw vegetables, you know.
I mean, you want to do a nice little stir
fry or something, and the butter gives you what you
(26:49):
need to do that if you don't have access to
cooking oils. This leads to what Professor Stirner calls one
of Luther's biggest teachings. Nothing of eating, drinking, sleeping, marrying,
or sex is sin. Not believing in God is sin.
That's a quote from That's a quote from the professor
and then sums it up this way. And I love
(27:10):
how approachable this professor's languages. And he's the one who says,
we're good. Yeah, same professor, she says. In other words,
everything is cool. Eating butter is cool. One of the
reasons why the Reformation was so successful. It was that
Luther radically changed how people thought about what's wrong and
what's permissible, and so in a very real way, something
(27:34):
that seems simple to us today, something simple as when
you are allowed to eat butter. In part, lad Martin
Luther to march up on October thirty one and fifteen
seventeen and publish his n theses. Uh. And the door
that we were referring to the way, the way the
(27:55):
story slash legend goes is that he nailed it to
a church door in his hometown of Wittenberg. And these,
you know, the whole crux of Theses was to call
into question fundamentally, you know, the idea of the pope
(28:17):
being essentially godlike, and you know, specifically this idea of
God being completely removed from the average man and woman
and their ability to communicate directly with God through prayer. Yes, absolutely,
And the printing press also emerges on the scene, which
(28:39):
means these teachings spread rapidly in today as we record this,
there are more than forty thousand Protestant denominations across the globe.
I mean, Theses was like, you know, the first meme
that's not bad it's pretty bad. A lot of memes, though,
I think everything your exactly meme classifications aside, this is
(29:04):
pretty profound to think that butter of all things and
change the could change the world. And I wonder if
people ever, if people ever think about that when they're
the next time, you know, they're in church, or they
go to a youth group where they oh. And I
do have to point out Martin Luther was not by
any measure a a perfect man, but in this case,
(29:29):
he did something amazing and it's fascinating. You know, if
you if you were listening to this and you identify
as Protestant, uh, give it, give it a think and
check out butter rich History to learn more about this strange, fascinating,
oftentimes invisible and profound ways in which this food stuff
(29:51):
affects you. What'st thou like the taste of butter? Man,
I'm so glad we say that reference for the end anybody, anybody,
which everybody but I was looking into it as well,
and I didn't think about this until we were researching this.
But the family that's portrayed in that film are Protestants,
(30:12):
but they're like even more extreme versions of Protestants. That
I want to just completely extricate everything associated with the
Catholic Church. And uh, there's a fantastic moment where butter
comes up as being almost like the most sinful indulgence.
So that's still stuck around even through Protestantism, although it
(30:33):
certainly wasn't like being taxed or in that way. Oh
that's a brilliant connection. Well done. I didn't think about that.
But what do you think about that? Is that is
that accurate? I don't know. I think I I think
it's intentional. I will go on the record saying anything
it's intentional because I was always these were Puritans in
the film. I was always wrapped up in the concept
(30:54):
of the clever word play of You know, we had
talked about this when we're hanging out earlier, not just
the because folks we fan boyd over this film so hard. Uh,
it was all we talked about for several weeks. And
I am so surprised that I missed that. And thank
you for telling me, because I dwelt on the concept
(31:16):
of not butter, the taste of butter. It's like the
pursuit of happiness, right. Um, But now I'm I'm going
to go back and watch the Witch, and I might
just do it eating a stick of butter. It's such
a thing as too much of a good thing. Well,
we're gonna find out firsthand. I'm I'm mostly kidding. I
(31:37):
have never to my analedge eating an entire stick of butter.
Give her a deep fried butter at carnivals. That's a
thing I have, but I haven't tried it. Did you
ever give it a show? Dude? No, too much of
a good thing? It just seems really weird. I feel
like butter is an ingredient and not its own snack. It. Well, mean,
it's like it's good on a piece of toast for sure,
which essentially is me. Come on, let's be real, eating
(31:58):
a piece of toast with butter on it. It's a
vehicle for butter. It's true. There's a there's a lot
of stuff, like some people dreat popcorn, is a vehicle
for butter. Well, you guys out there, tell us how
you like to eat butter. Do you like to deep
fry it? Do you like to just eat it with
a spoon? You know, what's your favorite? What about clarified butter?
We didn't There's so many things, but what am I doing?
(32:20):
What am I doing? We need to we need to
plug our friend Lauren and Annie's podcast, food Stuff. They
have a series of episodes on the history of butter
um and they also have a video that's pretty cool
called get Some Culture. Butter The tea is in parentheses,
So check out food Stuff. It's another house stuff works
(32:41):
podcast and they're they're friends of ours, so they're cool
and you should listen to them. Yes, yes, indeed, and
that will be just the beginning of your food science journey.
And this concludes our episode for today. We are going
to return, but as we said earlier, in the meantime,
we want to hear what you think, and I'd love
to hear about other foods that fundamentally changed the world.
(33:05):
You can let us know at our email address. We
are ridiculous at how stuff works dot com and hey,
we're all over the internet to yeah, we have real
stuff now. We've been just kind of like haphazardly, um,
you know, just saying search for us online, But no,
we have things now. We've got Instagram dot com slash
ridiculous History and Facebook dot com slash ridiculous History. And I,
(33:27):
if I'm being really probably would have figured that out
on your own, because you're all smart, scrappy people, and
we really appreciate you listening to this show and smooth like.
But we'll see again real soon
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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