I’ll keep this short so that you’ll have energy to read the Ethical Bargains post (below) and share your opinion here. In that post, I evaluated Ivy’s Reserve butter, claimed to be carbon-neutral by its maker, UK-based Wyke Farms.

In the end, I scored Ivy’s Reserve butter 2/5 Green Stars for social and environmental impact and at the same time realized that this is close to the maximum score that I’d give a dairy-based butter product.

Supporting companies like Wyke Farms that have worked hard on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is important. Also, supporting pasture-raised dairy (and eggs) does help reduce animal suffering. However, there are other ethical issues with dairy farming that are harder to avoid (e.g., male calves born to dairy cows are usually killed soon after birth).

So when I think about the spectrum of butter products available to us, both dairy and non-dairy, I find it hard to imagine scoring a dairy-based product more than 2/5 Green Stars. So basically Ivy’s Reserve received an ethical rating that’s good within the category of dairy-based butters but still subpar within the broader category of all butters.

Many kinds of plant-based butter have received high Green Stars ratings – for example Miyoko’s or Naturli’. The one exception (unfortunately, much more common) is butter made from palm oil that’s linked to deforestation.

I’ve given some palm oil based butters lower ethical ratings than pasture-raised dairy butter but I acknowledge that this is getting subjective. It can be hard to weigh, for example, the death of a dairy calf against the destruction of orangutan habitat. Thankfully, there are alternatives that avoid both outcomes – the better plant-based butters.

Overall, the product “butter” spans the full range of 0 to 5 Green Stars. Butter that’s made specifically from dairy milk occupies the lower end of that range (0 to 2 Green Stars).

Does this sound reasonable? What do you think?

Ivy’s Reserve – a carbon neutral butter from Wyke Farms