I never had butter as a child unless we went to a restaurant. We only had margarine because it's about $1.50 for a small container. My family usually had 3 or 4 in the freezer, along with 4-5 loaves of white bread. My parents being older seemed to stock pile food for "just in case" moments. As an adult I rarely buy butter because I don't want butter sitting out (even covered in a cupboard, it just weirds me out) and it's generally $3 - $4 if not on sale and if one has maybe a $30 budget for the week, the $1.50 - $2.00 savings could be another grocery item.
I understand margarine is not the healthiest or even tastiest choice but it's a decent substitute for butter vs nothing at all and for some people their choice is margarine or nothing at all. Or maybe they're like me and it's less of a condiment and something that you could also substitute for cooking oil (which is $3 to $6+ depending on the quality). And again, if you consider a period of time you have a small budget, it's much better to buy a multipurpose item that week than splurge on butter or a bottle of cooking oil and then have potentially nothing to use the butter with.
(Sorry if that seems stupid to explain but I think there might be some folks who might find it enlightening).
I did learn when I got older that the most likely reason I hated the taste of milk was that my parents froze it. I'm Canadian so we have our special bags of milk and they would buy two bags (you get three smaller bags in a larger bag because we like plastic) and freeze them. There was always a half frozen bag of milk in the fridge. You should not do this. Instead, although pretty unhealthy but in short term, do what the Newfies do and switch to Carnation or canned milk in the baking section for cooking and coffee/tea.
In recent years I've discovered one of the few reasons I used butter was actually, in my opinion, less superior than Crisco - which is less expensive than butter and lasts longer because it's not a condiment. Cookies are way, way better with Crisco. Flour and shortening were in hot demand during the toilet paper shortage.
Oh and if you learn how to make a basic soup, you can just throw a mostly random mix of things into a stock and say it's some special beloved soup recipe you invented. Helpful for when there's only random items left on the shelf. In fact, you can pretend you're on Guy Fieri's Grocery Games (which is also, to be totally fair to Guy, a fun reference to learn about ingredients and their uses + you can make fun of Guy).
…
