Thursday, February 17, 2011

Butter Dreams

The recent revelation by "This American Life" of the famed Coca-Cola formula brought back a lot of memories. Namely, that of my erstwhile entrepreneurial dream of creating VitaminButter.™

That's right! Butter with 100% of your daily vitamin requirements. It would be like eating Total™ cereal, without the flaky, dry crumbs in your mouth.

But the dream ran into a few potholes on the highway to success.

First, the vitamins were not stable when baked. They degenerated and created a chemical reaction similar to that of Coca-Cola dissolving a human tooth in a glass over time. So cakes baked with my VitaminButter™ prototypes ending up dissolving overnight. They literally ate themselves, leaving a faint whiff of sulfur in the process.

Then there was the problem with the aftertaste of the butter in its oleaginous form. It didn't bother me--at all!--but some people described it in scatological terms, which scared off my investors.


Finally, I didn't realize that condensing the essence of cow liver and heart into fat soluble butter would also condense the smell. All I could think of was the anti-aging properties of CoQ - 10 found in cow hearts and the skin softening Vitamins A and D in liver. I know. It's like "earth to Larry." I mean duh! Of course fat holds flavor too. But I had my eyes on the prize. And the blender filled with offal.

 Here's a recipe (I'm not saying it's the exact recipe, but it gives you a good idea of what I was working with):

1 stick butter
1 cow liver
1 cow heart


In its spray-form, VitaminButter™ was a thing of beauty. If you think Organic Canola Oil Pam™ tastes good, you have no idea how wonderful organic-truffle-with-a-touch-of-cracked-black-pepper-plus-tripe spray VitaminButter™ can be.

But unfortunately, in order to get 100% of your daily vitamins in its spray form, you needed to eat three cans full. Which unfortunately accounted for 7556% of the daily recommended intake of cholesterol.

At this point, I almost--almost--succumbed to despair. My wife (now ex-wife) suggested I find a different marketing tact. "Maybe you can package it with a DVD of Last Tango in Paris and call it a set," she said. "Or else Deliverance."

(But alas, distribution rights to the films proved beyond my budgetary constraints.)

See sometimes the Universe tries to tell us stuff. Like that I was destined for bigger things than butter.  If I'd succeeded, then how would I have had time to be a famous author? I'd be at home, boiling cow livers. Now I'm a Greyhound Road Rewards top tier member. And I've helped people all over the country find vitamins for their souls. 

Daily Affirmation: Thank you, Universe, for not limiting my talent to butter.


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