Why butter is food's MVP

Forget giving meat up for Lent.

If I was going to make a true food sacrifice, it would have to be butter. The glorious, delicately yellow concoction that Paula Deen disciples hand out like manna collected in gilded baskets.

Here's the case for butter, which can make anything taste better. Don't go overboard like the Brits and put it on a peanut butter sandwich, but a little butter (emphasis on a little) is perfection.

A toasted bagel -- even the whole wheat kind -- becomes sublime with a kiss of butter. Same with biscuits, cornbread ... vegetable soup and the venerable grilled cheese sandwich.

Butter, as the saying could go, runs deep in my veins. We used to make our own butter on occasion back on the farm. It was almost white in its creamy simplicity. Freshly churned butter is indeed one of God's gifts to us.

Much has been bandied about over the years between the impact butter can have on our health. It's fat, people, so don't eat a tub of it. Research has also show that the hydrogenated margarine that tried to pass itself off as healthier than butter is just as bad for you. And tastes like garbage.
(To call margarine "butter" in a generic sense is an insult. Do people who buy margarine actually confuse the two -- or are they just hoping to kid themselves into thinking they're eating butter when they smear on that whipped up oil?)

I digress. Butter rules.