Butter’s Back, Baby

People are feeding it to infants and churning it while jogging. What the heck?

Butter’s cultural moment reflects an impulse to live large when we can, while we can. Photo via Shutterstock.

By Jackie Wong, 27 Mar 2026, The Tyee. Jackie Wong is a senior editor at The Tyee.

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It’s good with eggs, key for baking and spread on toast. Butter, a kitchen staple so ubiquitous that it’s often overlooked, has recently smeared itself into a cultural resurgence as the focus of three dissonant trends offering windows into the hopes and anxieties of the first quarter of 2026.

Runners experimenting with making their own butter while jogging have turned (churned?) “butter runs” into a viral exercise trend.

By adding heavy cream to a sealable plastic bag and popping it into a fanny pack or running vest, it’s possible to churn the cream into butter, they say, by running for about an hour.

Elsewhere on the internet, a fleet of mothers has taken to TikTok to film themselves feeding butter to their babies.

A Vancouver-area woman filmed her baby devouring a stick of butter for the first time as part of her introduction to solid foods in December.

“What the helly,” she wrote in the video caption.

In a January post, a woman in Utah holds her young son in her arms while telling the audience that she gives him half a tablespoon of butter before bed every day to help him sleep. “Before that, he was waking up, like, once a night to eat,” she said.

The butter-for-babies content reads as a zany, devil-may-care response to the torturous sleep deprivation that can plague early parenthood. It echoes a style of parenting known as “fuck-around-and-find-out,” or FAFO. The 2025 trend was embraced by some as a hands-off, “do-what-you-will” response to the more earnest and emotionally labourious strictures of gentle parenting.

But the butter-for-babies phenomenon also carries misinformation. The viral videos don’t acknowledge two truths: it’s normal for babies to wake up multiple times a night, and research shows that what infants eat during the day does not affect how they will sleep at night.

Still, people may be poised to embrace butter for babies — or even butter for runners — because we are in a cultural moment when a greasy confluence of rising food costs, ‘Make America Healthy Again’ and raw milk influencers are shaping food culture.

There are also market forces at play.

In a December article for Forbes, food culture writer Stephanie Gravalese explained that in the United States, Americans are drinking less milk, but dairy processing remains steady.

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“When companies are sitting on this much inventory, seasonal baking demand is not enough to cover it. They must create new reasons for consumption, which explains the sudden rise in high-concept brand partnerships,” she wrote.

Gravalese declared butter the most unexpected food trend of 2025. Actor Melissa Joan Hart was named Pop Secret’s “Chief of Butter,” for example.

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