Canadians are looking for clarification on a hard question: Why is butter not spreading properly at room temperature?

The mystery, dubbed "buttergate," has been churning for weeks online, prompting the dairy lobby to look into the matter amid frothing concern that the altered texture could be a sign of compromised quality of the kitchen staple.

Social media chatter has gotten louder since cookbook author Julie Van Rosendaal tweeted earlier this month what was on everyone's mind.

"Have you noticed it's no longer soft at room temperature?" she wrote on Twitter. For hundreds, her inquiry confirmed what they've suspected for a while and a slew of stories about lumpy buttered toast, birthday cakes gone wrong and butter not creaming well ensued.

No one knows for sure what's behind the butter turning stiff and many possible theories have been making the rounds. One ingredient in livestock feed has emerged as a likely culprit.

Palmitic acid is a fatty acid naturally present in plants and animals as well as human skin and breast milk. It's also a dietary supplement deriving from the palm oil refining process, and research has shown the fatty acid has the potential to increase milk production and milk fat content in cows when added to their fodder.

The suspicion is that farmers have been relying on this substance to up their milk output and keep up with demand for the pantry essential, which was propped up by pandemic baking during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Retail sales of butter were up 12.4 percent in 2020, according to Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC), an industry body. This sudden appetite for high-fat dairy products is thought to have added pressure on farmers to churn out more milk in order to meet their new production obligations under a quota system that changes targets according to anticipated demand.

The DFC initially said they were not "aware of any significant changes in dairy production or processing," but as discontent spread they weighed in again, assuring that the practice of using palmitic acid in dairy rations is old and safe.

The organization also promised to set up a committee to investigate the claims – though that did little to soften the public's disappointment.

There's no scientific consensus on whether the palm oil extract has any effect on the firmness of the butter, but some experts believe that blocks with high levels of saturated fatty acids require a higher melting point, making them less likely to be soft when left on the counter.

And while butter isn't diet food, high intake of saturated fatty acids like palmitic acid is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Palm oil also has a reputation for being an environmental offender. The industry is a lifeline to poor farmers in Southeast Asia and Latin America but has been criticized for flattening rainforests to make room for plantations, threatening biodiversity and destabilizing ecosystems.

Industry players argue the ingredient is expensive and its use in dairy farms is limited. But with statistics hard to come by, it's unclear how widespread the practice is. One survey quoted by La Presse news website said that in Quebec, around 22 percent of dairy farms use palm oil byproducts.

The jury's still out on what's causing the unusual butter behavior but some dairy groups are going one step further to quench the controversy, like the Quebec Dairy Council, which on Wednesday urged farmers to stop using these substances.

So much focus has been on palmitic acid, but other hypotheses have surfaced.

One food microbiologist pointed a finger at the butter making procedure, saying that processing the butter too fast could make it hard. Seasonal variation has also been offered as that the difference in cow diets between winter and summer is usually reflected in the composition and melting behavior of butter. And then there're those who opine that this new revelation is long overdue, and that the butter perhaps isn't any stiffer than it has been for years.