To promote the reduction of holiday waste, the city of Ghent in Belgium urged its citizens to make spruce needle butter. Spruce needle butter is a type of compound butter infused with the flavors of a spruce tree. Belgian food authorities quickly stepped in to warn the public to not do that at all, please, they beg of you…
A quick Googling for the term “spruce needle butter” brings up a handful of recipes for infusing fats with Christmasy notes usually reserved for candles. While the idea of infusing foods with the needles of an evergreen tree is not unusual and is a technique once regularly used by Noma, the world-famous restaurant in Copenhagen that was long considered one of if not the best restaurants in the world, it’s not exactly common or as traditional as the city of Ghent made it seem.
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“In Scandinavia,” the city said, “they have been doing it for a long time.” Food historians who spoke with the New York Times argue that, no, they haven’t. It may have happened, and it may still happen occasionally, but it isn’t nearly as prevalent as they are suggesting.
Belgium Is Urging Its Citizens Not to Eat their Christmas Trees
Belgium’s top food watchdog agency warned that commercially purchased Christmas trees are often treated with pesticides and fire retardants. One of the big reasons we in the United States recently had a minor panic over black plastic kitchen utensils was because they contained cancer-causing and hormone-disrupting fire retardants harvested from recycled electronics. Or, at least, we thought they contained much more of those fire retardants than they actually do.
All Belgium is arguing is that you maybe shouldn’t eat your Christmas tree and that there are perhaps better ways to recycle an old Christmas tree than by eating the pesticides and fire retardants on it in the form of butter that tastes like an air freshener.
The city of Ghent meant well and went back and edited its statement to acknowledge the potential hazards of eating Christmas trees. As all of this was unfolding, Sweden swooped in and sided with Ghent, with its food safety agency agreeing with the rogue Pine-eating Belgian city, but only as long as the spruce needles being eaten were wild and had not been chemically treated.
Even then, they are only safe to eat in limited quantities, because at a certain point, you’re just seasoning your food with a bottle of Fabreeze.
