Well, that's one reason everyone stopped calling it butter extract – because it was never extracted from butter in the first place. The correct name nowadays is Imitation Butter Flavor.

The ingredients in imitation butter flavor are water, propylene glycol, artificial flavor, and FD&C* yellow 5 – none of which have ever been near a cow or a dairy farm.

It seems a little funny to us that we have diets where we can consume chemical solutions that have been formulated in a lab in the last 50 years or so, but we can't eat natural foods that have been sustaining humankind for millennia. We totally understand that you may be on a restricted diet, though, and we wish you happy baking with the completely dairy-free imitation butter flavor.

*The federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act often goes by this catchy acronym (or initialism, is you want to be really, really, really correct).