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We are well into the Christmas season, and if you live in Japan, that means sponge cake.

The traditional Japanese Christmas dish is served with strawberries and cream, and it is rich, thanks to lots and lots of butter. But the Japanese have been using even more butter for their Christmas cakes this year, exacerbating what was already a national butter shortage.

Elaine Kurtenbach, a reporter for the Associated Press in Tokyo, says climate change and an aging farming industry have led to the butter crisis. (Here's her Thursday story for the AP.)

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A man prepares a Japanese-style Christmas sponge cake at the Patisserie Akira Cake shop on Dec. 23, 2011 in Himeji, Japan. Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

A man prepares a Japanese-style Christmas sponge cake at the Patisserie Akira Cake shop on Dec. 23, 2011 in Himeji, Japan.

Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

"The weather up in Hokkaido, which is the main dairy region in Japan, is getting very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter, so the cows are stressed, and they don't produce enough milk," Kurtenbach tells NPR's Audie Cornish on All Things Considered. "And on top of that, the average age of farmers is about 70 now, and not many young people want to do the work."

Some cake shops in Japan have switched to margarine and other shortenings, but cake lovers are still left longing for the taste of butter, Kurtenbach says.

"Traditionally the Japanese aren't big consumers of dairy products apart from say, the elite," she says. "But when it comes to modern Japanese, they certainly eat a lot of Western food, they eat a lot of pastries and chocolates and cakes, and especially at Christmas time, not having enough butter on the shelves is kind of galling to many people."

For more from the interview, click on the audio link above.

Christmas foods

butter

Japan

A 44-year-old Northern White Rhino named Angalifu died this week at the San Diego Zoo of old age.

Now only five animals remain in this subspecies, all in captivity. Four are females. The one male lives in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

So it would seem the Northern White Rhino is doomed to extinction. Poachers are to blame — they've slain thousands of Northern White Rhinos to get their horns, which are hawked in Asia as a health tonic.

But there may still be a way to bring back this two-ton creature. The Ol Pejeta Conservancy is contemplating an idea. It's a bit complicated. But who knows?

First, a bit of history. There have been efforts to save the Northern White Rhino before. Rhino rarely breed in captivity, so just before Christmas in 2009, four Northern White Rhinos were airlifted from a zoo in the Czech Republic to Kenya's Ol Pejeta. They were placed in the heavily guarded 600-acre enclosure designed to mimic their natural environment. The half-a-million dollar operation was dubbed "Last Chance To Survive." The CEO of Ol Pejeta, Richard Vigne, says the rhino regained wild habits like nocturnal feeding. Although it took more than two years till the happy day that a duo was spotted mating behind a bush.

"I don't think there was champagne uncorked," says Vigne. But those in the know kept watch and said the female was "definitely pregnant ... so you know we convinced ourselves pretty well that this was working."

It was a false alarm. There would be no pitter-patter of little hooves. Vigne wondered if maybe those years in a zoo cage had permanently knocked out the ability to reproduce.

In-vitro fertilization is an option. But what takes ten minutes for dairy cows is expensive and experimental in rhino.

"You're dealing with semi-wild, what, 2 ton animal?" he says. "Which is very different than dealing with completely domesticated cattle."

Now another plan is being considered: To extract a northern white rhino egg, fertilize it with frozen northern white rhino sperm and implant it the surrogate womb of a genetically different subspecies: Southern White Rhino.

The Southern White Rhino look almost identical to the Northerns, though they have a larger front horn, and they also prefer a grassy environment while the Northerns like denser bush.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the Southern and Northern White Rhino is their epic comeback story.

At the turn of the last century, Southern White Rhino had been hunted down to a mere 20 animals. The last of the Southerns were collected, protected and bred. Now they number more than 14,000.

"I have bred over 700 rhinos," says John Hume, a private rhino owner/breeder who has been an advocate for legalizing rhino horn, "and the Southern White Rhino is a relatively user-friendly animal. It wants to cooperate, it wants to breed, it does not want to go extinct."

Hume breeds them the old-fashioned way: he brings some males and females together and lets biology do the rest.

Why did the Southern breeding efforts succeed where the Northern attempts have so far failed? The Southern White Rhino attempts began when the animals were younger. They were also wilder. 100 years ago, when those 20 last Southern White Rhino were collected and bred, they were taken straight from the savannah, not from a zoo.

Perhaps what enabled them to breed is that little bit of wildness that never left them.

If plans for a surrogacy attempt are approved, the Southern knack for survival might give a ray of hope to their near-extinct Northern cousins.

angalifu

northern white rhino

More In This Series

This is the second in a series of stories exploring the rich diversity of Christmastime edibles around the world, and the stories behind the food.

The Salt

About This Series: The 12 Days Of Quirky Christmas Foods Around The Globe

The Salt

Japan's Beloved Christmas Cake Isn't About Christmas At All

The winter holidays are a time of abundance, but for Christians in the Middle East, the official start of the Christmas season is marked by a decidedly rustic dish: porridge.

Archbishop Swerios Murad of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem says his congregation will eat boiled wheat kernels this week to mark the Feast of St. Barbara, or Eid el-Burbara in Arabic.

"It's is a simple porridge," Murad tells The Salt, "but it's very important that it be sweet."

St. Barbara was an early convert to Christianity in the town of Nicomedia, today Izmit in modern Turkey, Murad explains. She was the daughter of an over-protective father who built her a home in a tower to cloister her from the outside world. Yet, while her dad was traveling, Barbara converted to Christianity in secret. When her father found out, he tried to kill her.

Barbara fled her tower to the nearby hills. Murad says a shepherd tried to help her by keeping her hidden and feeding her simple porridge. But soldiers on patrol in the area found her and dragged her back to her father. Barbara's father had Barbara tortured and beaten, and when she refused to renounce Christianity, he cut off her head. In divine punishment, he was struck by lightning and died. Because of this lighting, Barbara became the patron saint of those who faced death by fire and later, artillery. Some folklorists have suggested that Barbara may have also helped inspire the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel tale many centuries later.

Murad says his congregation serves a porridge of boiled wheat, called burbara, to remember the food the shepherds gave to the young convert – and to recall the lessons of Barbara's fate.

"She obeyed our God, and not her father, as the Bible told us," Murad says. "First of all we must obey the words of God, and after that we respect our parents."

The feast is celebrated on Dec. 17 according to the Julian calendar, which is followed by Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land, including about 700 families in Israel and the West Bank. This tiny Syriac sect traces its roots to the earliest days of Christianity. Syriac is a dialect of the ancient language Aramaic, and it is still used in liturgical services held in St. Mark's Church, tucked into an alleyway of Jerusalem's Old City.

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Palestinian Christian Issa Kassissieh, in a Santa Claus costume, rings his bell and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, Dec. 22, 2013. Nir Alon/Demotix/Corbis hide caption

itoggle caption Nir Alon/Demotix/Corbis

Palestinian Christian Issa Kassissieh, in a Santa Claus costume, rings his bell and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, Dec. 22, 2013.

Nir Alon/Demotix/Corbis

On Tuesday night Nadia Ishaq stirred a soup pot full of fresh burbara in her home in Jerusalem's Old City. She decorated the dish with ground chickpea flour, ground coconut heaped across the bowls in the shape of a cross, and candied fennel seeds scattered across the top. Ishaq says she and her neighbors mark the holiday by bringing bowls of their porridge to each other. Syriac Orthodox Christians will celebrate Christmas this year on Jan. 7.

In total, there are nearly 200,000 Christians in the Holy Land. Catholics in the Holy Land — and around the world — marked the holiday earlier this month, on Dec. 4, according to the Western church calendar. Bernard Sabella, a retired associate professor at Bethlehem University, says that in his Roman Catholic family, the porridge tradition actually had an air of luxury when he was growing up. Boiling the wheat kernels takes between two and three hours, and the pot sends a rich, cinnamon aroma throughout the house.

"Breakfast was usually a cup of tea with a piece of bread and that's it," he recalls. "And therefore, making burbara was something out of the ordinary for us kids at the time."

In Bethlehem, he says, families often cook more than two pounds of wheat for the holiday, well exceeding what the household can eat. Workers take portions of burbara to the office to share with Christian and Muslim colleagues alike. Often, the burbara pot lasts a full week. Along with eating porridge, Eid Al-Burbara is also the time when families put up the Christmas tree.

"It's a celebration of the season," Sabella says. "And for us, when we prepare and eat the burbara porridge, it's really preparing for Christmas."

While there's some doubt about whether St. Barbara actually existed as a historical figure, she is known and celebrated throughout the Christian world. She is the patron saint of the Italian navy. Santa Barbara, Calif., got its name because its founder, the Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino, survived a storm just offshore on the eve of the St. Barbara feast day.

Archbishop Murad says that even though the Jerusalem Christmas season opens with porridge, the food of the holiday gets far richer, with chicken baked in sumac, colorful vegetable salads, and sumptuous meat.

"The first thing we think about on Christmas is lamb with rice," he says. "Most Christian families will have it."

Daniella Cheslow is a journalist based in Tel Aviv. She hosts a weekly radio show about food called The Tel Aviv Table.

Middle Eastern cooking

Holidays

Christmas

Updated at 9:21 a.m. ET

Alan Gross, the American contractor who spent five years in Cuban detention, has been freed and is on his way back to the United States. A senior administration official said Gross was released on humanitarian grounds in exchange for three Cubans jailed in the U.S.

As we previously reported, Gross, a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been working on a program to improve Internet access for Jewish Cubans.

He was covertly distributing laptops and mobile phones while traveling in Cuba on a tourist visa. He was arrested on Dec. 3, 2009. A Cuban court found him guilty of crimes against the state in 2011, and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

In December 2013, Peter Wallsten of The Washington Post told NPR Gross was being detained in a 10-foot by 12-foot room, with two other prisoners.

This month, Gross' wife, Judy, said her husband had lost more than 100 pounds during his detention. "He can barely walk due to chronic pain, and he has lost five teeth and much of the sight in his right eye," she said in a statement.

In an interview in June with NPR, Judy Gross said her husband was "despondent and very hopeless." She warned that he had said he would "take drastic measures if he's not out very shortly."

Gross had staged a nine-day hunger strike earlier this year.

Alan Gross

Cuba