Bread and butter issue

We’ve brought it on ourselves. Keeping butter in the fridge means that it won’t spread. One solution has been for butter manufacturers to make spreadable products. They often have familiar trademarks but list vegetable oil in the small-print contents. Another attack has now been launched with a new kind of butter knife. If the world will beat a path to your door, as Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted, for a better mousetrap, what will it do for its toast to be better buttered? The key to the new gadget are wee holes through which the hardest butter is forced in tiny ribbons, like minuscule pasta. Perhaps training may be wise, lest undue lateral force on the slab send it shooting into the dog’s basket in the corner of the kitchen. And is this grated butter not reminiscent of those butter shavings that once characterised hotels which aspired to be smart, but fell sadly short?