This morning I read an article about butter in the Guardian. It has the usual stuff about the margarine vs. butter battles of the 19th and 20th centuries, but adds an interesting tidbit about the Protestant Reformation: the Catholic church heavily restricted butter-eating, and the countries which went protestant in the 16th C were largely butter-eating areas of Europe, rather than the oil-eating southern bits which stayed Catholic. Correlation ain't necessarily causation, but it's a tasty coincidence nonetheless!