Butter is the most important food.

One thing that most people know about me is that I love butter. I mean, really really love butter.

My borderline-psychotic obsession with this creamy yellow dairy product was inspired by my Belgian-German-Polish-Wisconsinite grandmother. As a child, she would fry sirloin steaks in butter, so they sat on the plate in a savory brown liquid with soft floating bubbles of grease. She would lather butter on chocolate poptarts fresh from the toaster until they were slick and shiny. She smeared a decent portion on the bun beneath any sausage, be it bratwurst or hot dog. To this day, these foods seem naked without cow’s gift to man. If a sane person would adorn a certain food with an only slightly unhealthy amount of butter, I am guaranteed to overdo it. Some of my favorite foods are meaningless by themselves. Rice, pasta, and popcorn are mere vehicles for the savory flavor of that pale yellow heaven.

If I run out of butter, I feel as though my entire kitchen is empty. I cannot cook without it. I am paralyzed by fear that whatever I make will taste horribly bland and dry and will look up at me sadly from the plate and beg for a smooth fatty puddle to enrich it.

This obsession makes me infamous among my friends. Any guy I’ve ever dated, any roommate I’ve ever lived with, and any friend that has ever accompanied me to a restaurant has recoiled in horror when witnessing my butter usage for the first time. At sea food restaurants, the tiny cup of melted butter is never enough. I let crab meat soak in the bright yellow liquid, using a fork to lift the meat still dripping into my mouth. Toast slices with diner breakfasts are always inadequately buttered. I recoil in horror when someone orders dry toast. The idea repulses me. What is the point of toast without butter? It seems as absurd as a life without love. I put butter on sandwiches that are also going to have mayonnaise on them. I put butter in chicken fried rice and pad thai. I put butter on any cooked vegetable on my plate. When someone serves me something, saying “it already has butter on it” I always add more.

I’ve tried to be discreet about my severe butter addiction. I add the few extra clumps of butter to my food when no one is looking, I hide the butter pad wrappers under my plate. But eventually everyone becomes suspicious when my whole plate glistens. And when they finally catch me putting table spoons of butter on a handful of cooked zucchini, they realize that I’ve been doing this all along.

The only place I draw the line is eating raw butter. Though I’ve heard stories of people eating a stick of butter coated in sugar like a candy bar, I couldn’t imagine. Though I admit that deep fried butter sounds delicious, and I’ve put away a sizeable amount of raw cookie dough that wasn’t much more than sugar and butter.

When I’ve lived alone, I’ve put away a pound of butter in a week. My cholesterol is, thankfully, still within a normal range for a young woman like myself. But of course eventually old age is going to catch up to me and I am going to be forced into a world of bland, dry food.

But until then I can take comfort in knowing that at least Paula Deen knows how I feel.