Food-loving French are bereft of their butter

Their American counterparts eat a lot less and aren't dealing with a crisis

France is all out of butter at the moment. Reports Bloomberg’s Paris bureau chief, Geraldine Amiel: “Soaring global demand and falling supplies have boosted butter prices, and with French supermarkets unwilling to pay more for the dairy product, producers are taking their wares across the border. That has left the French, the world’s biggest per-capita consumers of butter, short of a key ingredient for their sauces and tarts.”

There’s been talk of a European butter shortage for months now, and the cause seems to be mainly the usual agricultural boom-bust-boom cycle: The 2007-2008 financial crisis hammered the dairy industry as global