A Dream of Gold and Green

How Irish butter took over the world. Words by Ana Kinsella. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week, Ana Kinsella explores Irish dairy supremacy, the meteoric rise of Kerrygold, and the complex feelings engendered by the idyllic image of Ireland that the brand evokes in its marketing campaigns.

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A Dream of Gold and Green

How Irish butter took over the world. Words by Ana Kinsella. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

A visitor who comes to Ireland in search of the country’s cuisine might find themselves wrong-footed. There are no unflinchingly Irish restaurants of long standing where one can dine and learn about traditional fare the way one might at Sweetings in London, Pelikan in Stockholm, or any given bouillon in Paris. The closest thing Ireland has to a national dish is stew, but personally, if I have a piece of stewing meat, I’d much rather use it to make bourguignon.

If I want to cook something that feels truly Irish, I’m more likely to look to certain produce and ingredients, rather than to a specific recipe or meal. In doing so, I’m in accordance with many of the cooks and writers most emblematic of this country’s food culture, including Darina Allen and JP McMahon, who have both written about how it is Irish ingredients that really make Irish cuisine. In the introduction to The Irish Cookbook, McMahon sets out to define the national cuisine as something between the influence of Ireland’s indigenous ingredients and of the migration the country has witnessed over centuries. ‘There is no such thing as a pure national food, an Irish food that exists outside place and time,’ he writes.

But this is shaky ground on which to build a food tradition. How can you pull a culinary identity out of, ‘Well, as an island we have access to fish, but historically we didn’t value seafood, and people were poor so mostly ate oats until finally potatoes arrived, and then a catastrophic famine changed the course of history’? You can’t, really. You look elsewhere for gastronomic identity instead. And, in a country like Ireland, you lean on dairy – because our dairy, we Irish tend to believe, is built different.

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For the twelve years I lived in London, I kept a list of foods I missed from home, a catalogue of groceries into which all my feelings of displacement could be channelled.

Among all the items on the list, Kerrygold had an almost totemic significance, even though it was widely available in London, and not just in specialist stores or big supermarkets. During moments of homesickness, digging into the Irish butter in my North London kitchen almost felt like going home and touching grass, the green, rain-soaked land manifesting in a block of pure yellow sunshine, made from nothing more than cream from Irish cows and a touch of salt, all wrapped up in distinctive golden paper packaging that has remained largely unchanged in my lifetime.

This might sound sentimental, but then so much of the emigrant experience is. And these days it’s not just London’s Irish émigré community putting Kerrygold on a pedestal. In certain circles, it has become synonymous with a sophisticated kind of foodie indulgence. It pops up in the Financial Times’s HTSI magazine as a coveted consumer good, and on TikTok and Instagram, where Stanley Tucci, Alison Roman and Oprah slice into it with gusto. In recent years, the brand has flown Michelin-starred chefs and content creators from around the world into Ireland for a whistle-stop, no-expenses-spared tour of the country’s gastronomic highlights – love for a brand rarely comes about by chance alone, after all.

In a way, I get it. Butter is luxury. That’s what it tastes like: cream rendered into something even richer. My earliest memory of wielding the butter knife puts me in the small kitchen at my aunt and uncle’s house, part of a production line of women and girls assembling sandwiches for a wake. My role was to butter each slice of bread, though I struggled to figure out how much to use. ‘We’ll need more butter than that, Ana,’ one aunt murmured, taking the knife from me. ‘We’re making sandwiches for a funeral, not an orphanage.’

Thirty years later, I am a dab hand. There’s always a block of Kerrygold in my fridge, a little luxury that has become an everyday thing. I use it to fry eggs and I melt it into mashed potatoes, elevating something unremarkable into something to be savoured with every bite. I love melting butter on the hob with a little garlic, the smell all through the house that makes your mouth water, and I love saving gold Kerrygold wrappers so that I can use them to grease cake tins or baking dishes. Hungry while cooking dinner, I cut myself a slice of bread and top it with a wedge of butter – bliss.

Although the notion that butter is probably bad for me is faintly imprinted on my mind, that idea is overwritten by my firm belief in the purity of dairy in the country I grew up in and where I live once more. I’m haunted by images of green fields, ads on television featuring people seducing each other over cheese sandwiches or by reaching for the butter dish, and childhood memories of older women exhorting me to eat more butter to put meat on my bones. Butter, I think, must be good for me: it’s part of my inheritance as an Irish woman.

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While writing this essay, I asked many friends and family members if they thought Irish butter was genuinely superior to the world’s other butters, and if so, why. Almost everyone I asked agreed that our butter truly was elite, providing a variety of defensive explanations that collectively add up to a kind of exceptionalism:

‘It rains a lot here, which makes the soil richer and the grass better for longer.’
This is true, but other European countries record more precipitation than Ireland. Nevertheless, the notion is pervasive, and Kerrygold even ran an ad campaign in 2013 called ‘Celebrating Rain’. Aimed at the export market, the campaign said that rain was ‘a kind of alchemy’ that could elevate Irish butter above the rest.

‘We have a culture and history of butter production. Our grandparents and great-grandparents knew how to churn butter!’
Also true (indeed, archaeologists have found butter preserved in Irish peat bogs that is more than 3500 years old), but other countries around Europe also have rich histories of dairy and butter production.

‘The cows here are just happy.’
This is my favourite. I have a memory of an ad for Irish dairy in which the farmer cuts the grass with nail scissors for his cows, shielding their eyes from the sight of the cattle transport truck that passed by their fields.

I asked Aidan Brennan, Dairy Editor at the Irish Farmers Journal, what he made of this. He pointed out that, unlike in many other countries, Irish dairy cows tend to graze outside on grass for much of the year. ‘I’m not aware that there is science to say that cows are happier when they are outside,’ he says, but ‘they definitely look happier. I think you can see it in their eyes.’

The typical Irish cow grazes outside for between eight and ten months a year and has a diet that is 95% grass. In the UK, many dairy herds similarly graze outside, but not for as long as Irish cows – six months might be more typical, in line with a shorter grass season. Given that cow-rearing is relatively simple (compared with, say, horses), depending predominantly on what you feed them, it seems reasonable that dairy from grass-fed cows who get to graze pasture for longer, in a country where it seems to rain endlessly, could indeed be exceptional.

Not everyone agrees that Irish butter is peerless, though. ‘I think you can find “good” butters in any of the historic butter-producing cultures – France, Britain, Scandinavia,’ says Eoghan Coady, an Irish chef who works at Noma in Copenhagen. ‘Danish butter on a whole tends to be of a higher quality … So [butter] is not something I yearn for if I haven’t been home in a while.’

Over the years, I’ve tried some excellent butters: I’ve enjoyed Rodda’s Cornish butter and luxuriated in Bregott Havssalt, the spreadable Swedish butter with actual flakes of sea salt running through it (though I can’t get along with France’s pale, greasy Président). As a result, I don’t know that I can fully ascribe to the blanket Irish exceptionalism with regard to our butter production. But there is one aspect of Irish butter that unquestionably sets it apart from its international competitors: how it has been branded.

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You may have noticed that thus far, I’ve used ‘Kerrygold’ and ‘Irish butter’ somewhat interchangeably. The connection between the two runs deep, surpassing food and agriculture and going right to the heart of Irish national identity. Because while it’s true that there are many other Irish butters, it’s also true that without Kerrygold, we probably wouldn’t have a coherent notion of what Irish butter really means today.

Ireland in the 1950s was a country in depression. In the years following the struggle for independence, the economy was sluggish, with high levels of unemployment and emigration. T K Whitaker, then a frustrated economist working as Secretary General at the Department of Finance in the civil service, set out a big vision for Ireland’s economic future, which focused on boosting national production capacity across industry and agriculture. As Irish beef stocks increased under the government’s new policies, dairy herds did too, since the production of the former depended on the latter.

But the domestic market for dairy was at capacity: Irish people were already consuming all the dairy they possibly could. Excess dairy products would thus need to be exported to other markets at a reduced price to ensure sales – unless, that is, they could be marketed in a way that made them seem more desirable than anything a French or English shopper could purchase closer to home.

In 1961, the Dairy Produce Marketing Act was passed and An Bord Bainne (the Irish dairy board) was established, with the intention of creating a single strategy for the export and promotion of Irish dairy. The following year, An Bord Bainne’s chief executive, Anthony O’Reilly, proposed the creation of an export brand to encapsulate Irish dairy for the world, and to provide somewhere for Irish dairy farmers to sell their produce. London ad agency Benton & Bowles was called upon to draw up a shortlist of names for the new brand; they discussed Buttercup, Leprechaun, Tub-o-gold, and Golden Farm before finally settling on Kerrygold. ‘O’Reilly was very single-minded and felt that Kerrygold sounded perfect, and he made the call,’ recalls David Gluckman, who worked on the campaign. ‘I also gathered that there were rumblings about there being no cows in Kerry, but we soldiered on regardless.’

Although there are dairy farms in Kerry, the rumblings were half-right: parts of the county’s picturesque, rugged landscape make for much better marketing images than they do open pasture. Never mind: Kerrygold launched in the UK in 1962, and within three years was available for sale in twenty international markets across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean. Early ads spoke of the Emerald Isle, the greenery of the pastures and the quality of the dairy herds – an image that played up to stereotypical ideas of how Ireland was already perceived by other Western countries, and omitted anything that wasn’t palatable or saleable to an international market.

An Bord Bainne transformed from a semi-state body to an independent co-operative in 1973, and in 2015, as EU milk quotas were to be removed, rebranded as Ornua. But even today, the USP of Kerrygold remains the same, especially for export markets. The earliest Kerrygold ads spoke of the butter being ‘village-churned’, implying that a strong-armed farmer’s wife was making it rather than the more industrial reality. (Kerrygold Park, Ornua’s landmark butter production and packaging plant, has capacity to make 80,000 tonnes of butter a year, and bears more resemblance to a data centre than anything else.)

Kerrygold Park. Image Credit: Malone O’Regan.

Around the world today, the brand continues to rely on an image of Ireland that is perhaps more bucolic than that reality. Seán O’Brien, a representative of Kerrygold, insists that ‘This image is not for show!’, describing it as ‘a true representation of a proud tradition’. But although that tradition does persist, it does so in a modern Ireland, with the resources and corporate acumen to transform Kerrygold into a billion-euro global food brand.

Sitting at my desk in Dublin, miles from the nearest dairy farm, I’m aware of the ongoing debates in Ireland around the carbon emissions associated with cattle and dairy, and what can or should be done to help pivot the dairy industry to a greener future. I live and work in contemporary Ireland, which is to say a complicated country that trades globally on a socially progressive image, while also toeing an economic agenda that has often put the needs of big corporations ahead of those of the vast majority of its citizens.

But I tend not to think about climate breakdown or pollution or the housing crisis when I unwrap a block of butter. If I’m thinking of anything beyond taste and my own sensory pleasure, it’s those green fields and the gentle farmer going out to check on his happy cows, because the symbol of Irish dairy farming is much more palatable than the reality. Isn’t it alluring?

Irish butter’s renown probably ‘has something to do with a sense of nostalgia amongst Irish-Americans,’ which has ‘helped turn Kerrygold (and Irish butter generally) into some kind of powerhouse in the global dairy market,’ Coady tells me. ‘Or maybe it is some sort of antiquated view of Ireland as this quaint little place that is largely rural and agrarian.’

These two factors are indeed linked. The romantic image of Ireland as a ‘quaint little place’ is key to the country’s global reputation – something that is particularly defined by the presence of the Irish diaspora. Tens of millions of people around the world claim some degree of Irish ancestry, thanks to the mass emigration of over 9 million Irish-born people since the 1700s. Most of these emigrants moved to Anglosphere countries, and collectively their presence there has helped to bolster Ireland’s reputation on the international stage.

Ireland takes its reputation seriously. How a country is perceived internationally doesn’t come about by accident. Here, soft power is a strategy that turns on promoting Ireland as a green and pleasant land of saints and scholars, a place of gentleness where arts and heritage are well funded. Ireland’s soft power is perhaps the world’s softest, because it’s built on images of gentleness and pastoral life: the green and pure and unpolluted. Perhaps, then, it’s summed up most succinctly by our exemplary butter, which we’re so often told depends on the greenery of the land, the purity of the soil, the gentleness of the farmer, and the strength of the farmer’s wife’s forearms.

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Of course, the way that Irish butter is marketed to the world isn’t exactly the same as the way it’s marketed to the people of Ireland. In the domestic market, many of Kerrygold’s most famous ads over the years have followed a different template, one in which a chic, sexy French visitor to Ireland falls in love with someone cooking with Kerrygold. It’s a simple formula that combines European sophistication with a little sex appeal, and its efficacy illustrates that for Irish people, the superiority of our butter still exists only when in the gaze of another nation – a real gourmand nation like France.

For me, this reciprocity harks back to the tension so many Irish people have felt in the space between staying home and leaving. At home, Kerrygold is simply what’s in the fridge. When it travels abroad, though, it can become heavy with symbolism and complicated national identity. Such a journey will inevitably involve a certain sentimentality, because small countries like Ireland run on this kind of backwards glance, this misty-eyed affection. If sentimentality means that Irish butter tastes better to someone like me, then what harm? It is, after all, probably the best thing five euro can buy me.

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Credits

Ana Kinsella is an Irish writer and author of Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy, and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry, among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li.

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