Butter sculpture goes back to banquet art of the Renaissance and Baroque, where cooks made butter figures for special dinners. The earliest known reference dates from 1536 and describes work by Pope Pius V's cook Bartolomeo Scappi. The American sculptor Caroline Shawk Brooks took the craft further. After marrying a farmer, she made her first butter piece in 1867 to promote dairy products, and she worked with traditional tools like a butter paddle and a camel's-hair pencil. Her 1873 Dreaming Iolanthe, based on a Danish verse drama, drew more than two thousand visitors in Cincinnati in 1874. She kept the butter cool with ice so it would not melt in exhibitions.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.