What's Actually In Your Butter Container Right Now?

We’d bet money that you keep anything but butter in there.

If my grandparents taught me anything, it's that you don't let a perfectly good container go to waste. Who needs to spend money on expensive, high-quality glass food containers when your empty butter container will do the trick?

Maybe this stems from a deep desire to protect our planet. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? Or maybe it's simple human ingenuity. Whatever the case, there's really no harm in rinsing out your Country Crock or I Can't Believe it's Not Butter container to fill it up with something else. When I opened the refrigerator as a kid, I'd see more than one container of butter or sour cream and it would be a roulette game of finding the one container that actually held the product on its label among those filled with some super spicy homemade salsa.

Nowadays, a large portion of my food storage collection consists of reused deli meat containers. Shout out to Lunch Mate Family Size Oven Roasted Turkey for keeping my leftovers safe. The only thing to be careful about is the reheating process. Trust me, sometimes I don't want to create more dirty dishes, so taking leftovers from the refrigerator straight to the microwave is a choice I am guilty of making. Unfortunately, fellow Takeout staff writer Dennis Lee has pointed out that this is not the best way to reheat food in the microwave.

Although heating plastic in the microwave is inadvisable, in my defense, I would also like to note that I once heated up my lunch in a glass container at work and it promptly broke into large shards. The noise was loud and embarrassing, but somehow my coworkers at the time were so distracted by their own food that I was able to clean it all up and safely throw it out without anyone noticing. (This was before my time at The Takeout, so I assure you no food writers were harmed—just my pride.)

Takeout editor in chief Marnie Shure admits that the butter container in her fridge is currently filled with wet dog food. So, tell us, what's in your butter container?

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