Two Swedes have been arrested by Norwegian police for smuggling more than 250kg of butter into the country, offloading one consignment for more than £25 a packet.

The two men, from the Northern city of Umea, managed to make their first delivery before a police patrol stopped their van on Saturday evening.

“They allegedly sold the coveted butter packets in Beitstad Steinkjer before they drove north along the county road 17,” police officer Lars Letnes told Norway’s Adresseavisen newspaper.

“Then they were stopped by a police patrol, which found 250kg of butter in the small van.” A sudden spike in demand has left Norway with a butter shortfall of between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, leaving the country’s citizens facing Christmas without their seven traditional varieties of home-cooked biscuit…

The arrests follow the seizure earlier this month of a 90kg consignment found stashed in the car of a Russian man at the Norwegian-Swedish border. The Norwegian police plan to destroy the confiscated butter.

They could always switchover to lard. That’s the traditional way to handle shortages of plaque in your circulatory system here in New Mexico.



  1. orchidcup says:

    It is comforting to know that the Norwegian police are hard at work protecting the population from the ravages of processed dairy products.

    They must not have anything else to do with their time.

    • ABO says:

      Let me tell you about police with nothing to do. San Anselmo, California. 2:30am on a Sunday morning. A San Anselmo police officer places a ticket under the windshield of a vehicle parked legally on a city street in front of my friends home. The vehicle is a company car he has taken home that weekend.
      Violation? The yearly California registration sticker indicating the year is not perfectly straight. I don’t mean the sticker was at a thirty degree slant or something. I looked at it. It was, at most, about 8 degrees from perfectly level.
      A $150 ticket in San Anselmo. The company fought the ticket in court, the the Marin County asshole judge UPHELD the fine.

      I’ll take my chances in Norway rather than trust the Marin Police to be anything but complete assholes. I have had a few dealings with them, and they all have a fucking nightstick up their ass.

  2. Skeptic: post #1 says:

    They should have just buttered up the cops and slipped away into the night.

  3. dusanmal says:

    @eideard “They could always switchover to lard. That’s the traditional way to handle shortages of plaque in your circulatory system here in New Mexico. ” – please do not blaspheme lard in particular or fats in general.
    Fact about lard: it is a “good” fat. Only with olive oil can you do somewhat better. Plenty of published research on that.
    Fact about fat in the diet: Despite being genetically thin throughout my life, I am on a diet. Because that is the only way to reduce my cholesterol, miracle meds’ do little for it. Guess what type of diet have dropped my cholesterol for almost a half in about 9 months and is keeping it there over years: Atkins. Plaque in your circulatory system is not there due to the fat alone but carbs… No fat storage is possible without carbs’. Happily cooking with lard and consuming about a pound of bacon per day (among other fatty things) – cholesterol sitting pretty at 150 with good one dominating … BMI just dropped below 22… [ on standard American diet my BMI was 24 but cholesterol was nearing 300].

    • orchidcup says:

      I subscribe to the new Common Sense Diet.

      I eat only when I am hungry. Sometimes that may mean I only eat one meal a day, or even no meal at all.

      I eat anything I want, including butter.

      I keep my body well hydrated with water or juice.

      I am not obese and my cholesterol is fine.

      • msbpodcast says:

        I also only eat non-processed food and I stay the hell away from corn based products. (Ever walk down the aisles at a grocery store and try to find an item that is not made up of or contain corn or corn byproduct? Its a pretty long walk for not a lot of products.)

    • elsheffo says:

      Read the label on your lard, first. Aside from gourmet class leaf lard, you’re buying a product with as much crap in it as Walmart margarine.

      • deowll says:

        I like corn. I do try to stay away from fructose. To much of that is not a good thing.

  4. NewFormatSux says:

    Aren’t you going to link the Colbert bit on the butter shortage in Norway?

  5. R says:

    While the police were busy busting the van with the smuggled butter, the trucks carrying the illicit drugs got through in a clean getaway.

  6. LibertyLover says:

    I read somewhere about these countries jacking up the taxes on foods the central planning committees deemed unhealthy. I wonder if this is the result.

    • orchidcup says:

      Actually, it is the result of a fad diet in Norway consisting of high carbs and low fats.

      The Norwegians are eating less butter for most of the year, so the demand and production went down significantly.

      During the Christmas season, Norwegians eat traditional foods that are loaded with butter.

      The demand for butter skyrocketed this month, so they have an extreme shortage of butter for their holiday treats.

      Somebody in the butter industry should have seen this coming.

      • msbpodcast says:

        Rest assured, they did.

        This shortage is probably because some idiot governmental officer in Belgium didn’t know about the Norwegian propensity for high-fat confectioneries at christmas and ordered all the butter to be sold to EU member states throughout the year,

        The Norwegians would just have stockpiled the stuff in cold storage (which just means leave the door open for half the year,) and profited at christmass

  7. Dallas says:

    Rush Limbaugh’s Norwegian cruise is still considered the largest butter smuggling bust in Norway’s history.

  8. TheOne says:

    wow 😮

  9. orchidcup says:

    Betty Botter’s Better Batter

    Betty Botter had some butter,
    “But,” she said, “this butter’s bitter.
    If I bake this bitter butter,
    It would make my batter bitter.
    But a bit of better butter,
    That would make my batter better.”

    So she bought a bit of butter –
    Better than her bitter butter –
    And she baked it in her batter;
    And the batter was not bitter.
    So ’twas better Betty Botter
    Bought a bit of better butter.

    • Skeptic: post #1 says:

      Betty Botter’s Biting Beaver

      Betty Botter bought a beaver.
      But the beastly beaver bit her.
      So she bought a biting badger.
      And the badger bit the beaver.
      Since the badger bit the beaver,
      now the beaver will not bite her.
      So ’twas better Betty Botter
      bought a beaver-biting badger.

      • Skeptic: post #1 says:

        Wow, not one lewd joke about Betty Botter’s biting beaver.

        Dvorak is slipping.

  10. Anonymous says:

    What is it about the Great White North? There always seems to be an constant artificial shortage of butter, bacon, beans and/or beer.

    Could it be that since legalizing recreational drugs and prostitution that these cops have nothing better to do than enforce bogus butter busts on an otherwise happy population?

    What’s next? Rousting reindeer roundups?

  11. #20--bobbo, the pragmatic existential evangelical anti-theist says:

    Anyone know “why” its illegal to sell butter directly from farm to retail outlet? Was it only because of crossing a national border which I thought the EU was all about changing?

    something doesn’t add up.

    but to the more relevant off topic of diet, one of the more interesting/informative things I have done is put myself on the Zone Diet. Like all diets, if followed, it works. But once off the diet and you start yo-yoing up and down, the rewarding residual is that you “know” more about what it is that you are putting into your body. All about carbs, proteins, and fats. After that if you pick up the hobby of baking, you can learn with a different perspective how close ingredient wise so many food are. My Mom used to get heat for feeding us oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for breakfast and/or lunch. As a kiddie she told us it was healthy and the only way we would eat oaks, wheat germ and what not. Her recipe had half the fat, half the sugar, and twice the oats. almost not really a cookie but when you grow up with it, it just what you want. The difference between bread and cake is usually just the addition of sugar and fat. Same across a whole range of foods.

    On my bucket list: churn heavy cream into butter and butter milk. I understand they are quite good when natural.

  12. AC_in_Mich says:

    I’m on the DASH diet – a diet not that very well known, but developed by the National Institute of Health and I think the Mayo clinic for High Blood pressure.

    Nice thing about that diet is you can eat a lot of common foods, just use restraint and common sense. Of course, if we could do that we wouldn’t be such an obese country (“Gimme that triple cheeseburger and supersize the meal”)

  13. sargasso_c says:

    Those wacky, Swederanians.

  14. Guyver says:

    A distraught Norwegian: http://tinyurl.com/7fotu4r

    A concerned American trying to set things straight: http://tinyurl.com/c8j4zdu

  15. Buzz Mega says:

    Butta cop, butta cop, oh, butta, butta…

  16. Larry K says:

    Dat’s pure budda baby!

  17. deowll says:

    Are we any better? Don’t you dare drink raw milk!

  18. Peppeddu says:

    You smuggle when there’s a ban
    You import when there’s a shortfall

    It doesn’t make any send to smuggle when there’s a shortfall, unless something else’s going on.

  19. Likes2LOL says:

    If the U.S. would airlift in a couple of C5As full of butter,
    the Norwegians would be our best friends forever…

  20. Glenn E. says:

    There was this BBC Tv comedy series called “Chef!”. In one episode, the restaurant owner decides he wants unpasteurized English Stilton (a cheese) for his customers. But apparently that’s illegal in the UK. Some farmers still make their own cheeses, which are unpasteurized. So he starts visiting surrounding farms for whatever they can produce. Ditching the state licensed dairy vendor, because all they have is pasteurized cheese products. Which I gather doesn’t taste as good. I know I wouldn’t touch pasteurized Swiss cheese. Ugh!

  21. Glenn E. says:

    My parents told me that during WW2 many food sales were rationed. Supposedly the food supply was being used to feed the troops, overseas. However, not everything travels well across the sea. Butter was one of those things. And it must of gone off, when it reach England or Europe. So they gave it to the Russian. Either it when bad on the long trip, or the farmers dumped rancid butter on the government, who didn’t bother to check it first. Same with any cheeses they got. One wonders if the food supply the military gets, has ever been of decent quality? Seems I heard during Desert Storm, that the MREs were considered awful. Meals Rejected by Everyone. Between military chow, and public school lunches, it’s quite a racket they’ve got going.

  22. TThor says:

    The reason for the butter shortage is the ‘no-carb’ diet craze that promotes all fats including lard. And it works, as long as you stay away from any kind of starch/sugar based food: cereals, pasta, bread, potatoes and sugary vegetables like carrots etc.
    What happens to the cholesterol level is another issue.

  23. Bonammi says:

    Tisk Tisk Tisk..What is this world coming to?

  24. David R Jenkins says:

    When butter is outlawed only outlaws will have butter.

    • msbpodcast says:

      Makes it hard to hold a gun steady; too slippery.

      Not to mention that people wipe their hands on your vest after shaking hands with you while going Yuck!

  25. W.T.Effyall says:

    There’s only one thing to do: Declare a war on butter.

  26. Winston Smith says:

    THAT’s what we need HERE: a butter shortage.

    My God, this one has “new jobs” potential written all over it. We can employ 50,000 Butter Control Agents in black ninjacop uniforms. Of course, they’ll need lots of black helicopters, and we’ll have to gut that whole 4th Amendment thing again, because God knows WHAT else people are hiding in their refrigerators, right?

    And remember, it’s FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!

  27. Dallas says:

    Speaking of butter fat, please post more Noob Gingrich campaign stories!!

    The TeaPublicans are starting to embrace the Mormon again and there’s lots to talk about yet from the Noob camp.

  28. Chris Mac says:

    what year is this


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