The hottest competitive sport in Denmark over the past year hasn’t been handball, or football, or badminton. It’s been chasing cheap butter in the supermarket. Recent inflation has doubled the price of butter. Butter chasing is how even high-achieving, high-earning Danes have been spending their time. Nobody wants to pay 30 kroner for butter. Butter is a part of the Danish soul. The Danish word for butter is smør… you might be familiar with smørrebrød, the famous open-faced Danish sandwich. Smørrebrød means buttered bread. So even though inflation has hit Denmark recently just like everywhere else in the world, supermarkets use low, low butter prices to bring in customers who will buy their other goods. Butter is a big business in Denmark – it is one of the world’s top 10 butter exporters – and dairy in general is a big part of the traditional Danish diet. There used to be corner shops called mejeri, dairy shops, that only sold dairy goods and eggs. Evolutionists would tell you that Scandinavians evolved to get more Vitamin D from food, since they don’t get much from the sun for most of the year. If you’re learning Danish, look up all the expressions that begin with the word “smør.” I counted about 30 in Den Danske Ordbog, Denmark’s official online dictionary. One well-known expression is smørgris – butter pig. That’s someone who loves butter so much that they eat great amounts of it, with gusto. Or smørhul, butter hole. A butter hole takes its name from the hole in the middle of a bowl of oatmeal. You make a hole so you can put the butter inside. But smørhul has a bigger meaning. A ”butter hole” or smørhul, is a way to describe a very nice place, safe from the tumultuous world around it. A “butter hole” is the way many Danes see Denmark itself.
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