when should butter get involved with toast? an investigation

the people in my life are divided on the matter. where do you draw the line?

It is 8pm on a Sunday and I am dropping two slices of wholemeal bread into the toaster. My husband and I have been binge watching yet another Netflix show all afternoon and we’ve reached the conclusion that the Dr Oetker Ristorante pizza (an elite choice) we ate at 5pm for an early dinner has not filled the gaping void in our stomachs and hearts.

I am spreading Lurpack butter on my toast, which I will elevate with a sprinkle of salt flakes. This is known as ‘special toast’. Jonny has asked for peanut butter on his toast. The peanut butter is crunchy (as it should be) yet relatively smooth in texture. I feel a pang of joy because I know this will be easy to spread.

I spread this crunchy yet smooth peanut butter onto his slice of toast and he interrupts me to ask a question that has haunted me ever since. ‘Did you put butter on first?’

I am so incredulous that I think he is joking. Surely he does not want both butter AND peanut butter on his toast? That would be insane, wouldn’t it? But no. He is being serious. This man that I have shared a life and a bed with for the last few years has been combining both butter and peanut butter the entire time. Betrayal?

This prompts a wider debate on the relationship between butter and toast. I ask whether he would also have butter with Philadelphia. He says yes, I feel sick. He asks if I would have butter with jam and I say no, unless it’s on a croissant. He says that’s stupid. He asks if I would have butter with scrambled eggs. I say yes, obviously, but that’s different. I ask if he would have butter with Nutella. He says yes. This is too much.

He argues that butter is the base for all things and I agree, unless another spread is involved. I argue that a spread should exist in its own right and therefore does not need butter as another layer of spread before it. He asks if I would have butter in a cheese sandwich and I say yes of course, because that is a sandwich and sandwiches need butter to stick the cheese to each slice of bread to bring it all together. We are not getting anywhere with this.

We take the dispute to various group chats with family friends and I find that people are drawing very different lines as to where butter plays a part. There are riots when it is revealed that my mum would have pâte with butter but my aunty would not. My friend Meg says that butter and Philadelphia on a bagel is a game changer and that I’m missing out. My stepsister angrily declares that you should ‘never mix a spread with butter’, yet our friend Bekki is combining butter with Nutella even though she admits she feels it’s wrong. No one is aligned on whether jam and butter need to be together – apparently it is carb-dependent. Chaos.

I worry that diet culture may have played a part in mangling my brain into being so afraid to ever add an additional 80 calories to anything, that I have potentially missed out on a considerable amount of joy. But the thought of two spreads working as one makes me shudder. And if I were a scientist who specialised in spreads, I would still argue that jam, peanut butter, Nutella, Philadelphia and pâte are spreads that should go at life alone without the claustrophobic chaperoning of butter.

This has lived in my brain for too long now and I’m sorry, but I need it to live in yours too. Please tell me where you stand. Am I wrong? Vote below, leave a comment and help me to figure out when butter should get involved with toast. Because at the moment, I’m considering never letting butter get involved with anything ever again.