Butter

- La tour du Beurre (butter tower), Rouen Cathedral

First the Danes ban Marmite and now they're taxing butter. Seeing this in the news reminded me of the "Butter Tower" and in looking that up I found Thomas Aquinas mentioned too. He was a proponent of giving up dairy products like butter, not because of the dangers of saturated fat, but because he thought such foods made people libidinous ..... capital punishment, just war theory, death to heretics, and now has it in for butter too :( ...

During the early Middle Ages, meat, eggs and dairy products were generally forbidden. Thomas Aquinas argued that "they afford greater pleasure as food [than fish], and greater nourishment to the human body, so that from their consumption there results a greater surplus available for seminal matter, which when abundant becomes a great incentive to lust." However, dispensations for dairy products were given, frequently for a donation, from which several churches are popularly believed to have been built, including the "Butter Tower" of the Rouen Cathedral. - Lent

There are real ethical reasons not to eat dairy products, such as concerns about how dairies treat animals. If you're like me and eat dairy but worry about ethics, check out this post from In Living Color -- Got Ethical Milk?