April 11, 2020 • 37 mins
This 2016 episode delves into how industries and governments had a really weird preoccupation with protecting people from margarine way before it was made with the hydrogenated oils that led to its unhealthy reputation in more recent years. There's even bootlegging involved.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Uh. Not too long ago, as this
pandemic began, we dropped a playlist of offbeat history episodes
into our fee just as a lot of folks in
the US as well as other places, we're really starting
to face the possibility of being isolated at home for
a while. And after we did that, a couple of
people noted that it seemed odd that such a playlist
(00:22):
did not include one of our most offbeat episodes, and
one that I know is one of Tracy's very favorite,
Butter versus Margarine. It is, And the real reason that
that wasn't on there is that when I pulled that
list together, we were trying to stick to episodes that
were more than a year old and that had not
been re released as a classic in at least a year.
And I could have sworn we had done Butter versus
(00:44):
Marjarine recently. Uh maybe I was really thinking of Peanut Butter.
I don't know. It was kind of a weird week
and we were all just trying to get through it,
so by popular requests, I too thought we had run
it more recently. Here's Butter Versus March Rain, which originally
came out on August one, Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(01:09):
in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and
I'm Holly Frying. This time last year, my apartment was hot.
I like, how while we have recorded today, because we'd
(01:30):
record an other thing, many things at once, the heat
has come up many times. It has been a long
stretch of and above, which sounds like Heaven to me.
But I know I'm a weirdo. We don't have air conditioning. UH,
So it was hot. I was looking at a very,
very dark and heavy short list of podcast topics to cover. Uh.
(01:50):
And when this happened last year, the result of my
quest to find something that was cool and pleasant to
talk about was good humor versus pops popsicle. Uh. The
exact same thing is happening as we speak right now,
and it has brought us to today's topic of butter
versus Margarine. So unlike the popsicle episode, which involved this
handful of businesses and their ongoing legal battles about who
(02:12):
could get to make which frozen treats, this one is
about whole industries and entire governments and just a really
weird preoccupation with protecting people from the nefarious horrors of
margarine way before people were making it with the hydrogenated
oils that led to its like more unhealthy reputation in
more recent years. There's even bootlegging involved in this whole story,
(02:34):
So big props to our colleagues at house Stuff Works
now for the Ridiculous History series, which is a series
of articles about weird things in history, and it's home
to the article that inspired today's show, which is delightfully
entitled Land of Fakes Margarine bootlegging in Canada. And as
was the case when we talked about the history of cheese,
most of the stories about where butter came from our
(02:56):
probably apocryphal. All of the English words for butter trace
back to Latin, with the Greek origins purportedly stemming from
the words for ox or cow and cheese, although there's
some debate about all that. So grain of salted uh.
There are various tales about nomadic people's whether they were
European or Western Asian, traveling with pack animals possibly camels,
(03:20):
and the milk slashing around in skins turning into butter.
Similar stories go with the cheese Yale milk in a
skin and it came out as cheese because Rennet like,
that's the cheese origin story. Uh. This story, for better
makes logical sense because butter is made when milk or
cream are agitated in some way, usually by being shaken up,
returned until the fat coagulates and then these fatty solid
(03:42):
bits can be pressed into delicious butter and butter milk
is was left behind, and a number of early cultures
did store liquids in skins and also simultaneously traveled with
them on pack animals, so it's possible that's what happened
all the same, though it's just about impossible now to
determine the exact birthplace and time of butter because it
(04:02):
all melted, not all of it, not all of it
because this next bit, or if they were traveling with
me because I ate it. Thanks to written records in archaeology,
we do know that butter has existed for at least
five thousand years, and we do have some actual samples,
so my smart alocky comment does not apply. We have
(04:25):
actual samples of incredibly old butter thanks to Ireland's Pete Bogs.
As early as three thousand BC, people living around those
bogs buried butter, often in a wooden vessel, but sometimes
in a skin or a croc or some other container
in the bog. We're not sure this was a if,
this was a preservation technique or an offering or some
(04:46):
completely other purpose. But thousands of years later, people are
still stumbling onto these long buried deposits of butter, and
some of which are really tallow or something else that's
fatty and waxy. Some of it's basically better there it
usually smells really rancid. So don't fancy don't don't eat
bog butter, Margarine, that's the shirt I want. Don't eat
(05:07):
bog butter. Okay, He's kind of like, don't eat the
yellow snow, don't eat the bog butter. Just life lessons. Yeah,
so margarine, on the other hand, much easier pedigree to trace.
At the eighteen sixty six World's Fair, Emperor Louis Napoleon
the Third, who was nephew to Napoleon Bonaparte, announced that
he wanted a substitute for butter that could benefit poor
(05:28):
people and the French military. So the price of butter
had almost doubled in the two decades leading up to
this announcement, it was just way too expensive for a
lot of people in France to afford. And it was way,
way way too expensive to just serve it up to
France's armed forces. Cost way too much money. The French
War Office offered a cash prize to the person who
(05:49):
could solve this problem. The idea wasn't just to make
something that might taste good enough to tempt people to
spread it on their bread instead of butter. It needed
to work as a substitute for butter and cook king
and ideally it needed to be less perishable than butter,
which turns rancid pretty quickly when it's not kept cold,
and it needed to have some dietary value in the
(06:10):
form of fat and calories. French chemist Epolite mes Mourrier
took the prize in eighteen sixty nine with a spread
herble emulsion of beef, tallow and water turned together with
a little bit of milk for flavor, and it met
all the right criteria. Was a dietary source of fat
and calories that had a sort of buttery taste, and
it was cheap. It costs as little as half the
(06:31):
price of butter. He called it oleo margarine, probably more
like oleo margarine in French with my terrible French accent.
This came from the Latin oleum for beef fat and
the Greek the Greek margarite for pearl. There are also
some sources that say that this came from margaric acid,
which was at the time believed to be a fatty
acid head that was heavily present and milk. But all
(06:54):
of the chemistry involving that at the time was just wrong.
My mother, who was very good cook, her mother was French,
and you know, even well into the nine nineties, my
mom would call margarine olio. Yeah, olio was what it
was called in a lot of places. Mesh Mourier patented
(07:16):
his invention and eventually sold his patent to Dutch buttermaking
company Urgans Jurgen's would eventually go on to become part
of Unilever, which, by total coincidence, now also owns the
popsicle brand. Because everything is connected in some weird full circle.
Mesh Mourier was granted a U S patent in eighteen
seventy three, which he sold to the US Dairy Company.
(07:37):
He was granted patents in a few other nations as well.
All these patents make it sound like he became successful
off of this invention. He really didn't make a lot
of money off of it, though. Margin didn't really take
off in Europe. France, of course, is famous for its
very buttery cooking, and French chefs and citizens were just
not too excited about swamping butter for a spread invented
(07:57):
by a chemist which people thought of as artificial. Also
didn't catch on quickly in other European nations either, and
most of the laws that were passed relating to it
in Europe were just devoted to trying to prevent people
from fraudulently selling margarine labeled as butter. By eighteen eighty seven, Germany,
for example, had enacted a margarine law mandating very clear
(08:19):
label labeling and separate displays for margarine and butter in
shops right on. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United
States all took steps to regulate margarine. So marjarine story
(08:42):
in Canada is pretty straightforward. Canada had a total marjarine
prohibition from eighteen eighty six until nineteen forty nine, with
one brief window from nineteen seventeen until ninety two because
of dairy and butter shortages during World War One. That
brief window did not reopen during World Were two, though,
because at that point the government dealt with these shortages
(09:03):
through rationing rather than by temporarily allowing people to buy
artificial butter. The reason for Canada's prohibition was that was
that marjarine was viewed as an injurious product that people
needed to be protected from. However, for decades after marjarine's invention,
Newfoundland wasn't yet part of Canada, and in Newfoundland things
(09:23):
were quite different. The climate there didn't make cattle farming
easy at all. You would basically have to keep your
cows inside for much of the year, and consequently most
dairy products, including butter, had to be imported. I'm just
going to make a little side note that every time
we say Newfoundland on the podcast, we get a different
video with a different correct pronunciation. So I'm just putting
(09:45):
that out there. If you were about to type us
an email, just save your time. Right. So, Newfoundland welcomed margarine,
and since it was so much easier to make margarine
there than to raise cows, it developed its own margarine industry.
Marjarine was also an important part of the diets of
many Newfoundlanders, and thanks to its calorie calorie and fat
(10:05):
content enriched marjarine even became part of a specific government
effort to combat malnutrition. People from Canada who wanted marjarine
during this whole Canadian prohibition would smuggle it in, either
from Newfoundland or from the United States. All that together
means that during the Union between Newfoundland and Canada in
(10:27):
ninety nine, marjarine became a problem. Canada's laws did not
allow a product to be legal in one province and
illegal in others. So even if Newfoundland had just started
importing butter from the other provinces, it would be way
more expensive than marjarine. Plus, nobody really wanted to destroy
Newfoundland's existing marjarine industry, so the nineteen forty nine British
(10:52):
North America Acts spelled out that Newfoundland could keep making
margarine like this is This is really basically the Act
of union between these nations to become one nation had
a part in it about about margarine. Eventually, the Supreme
Court of Canada ruled that margarine was no longer an
injurious product product and left regulation up to the provinces,
(11:12):
which individually repealed their margarine bands and more gradually repealed
laws that specified that the margarine had to be a
specific color. The last of those was actually repealed in
Quebec in two thousand and eight. Very recently. We're going
to talk more about colors of margarine a little later.
Pink and purple. Uh No, the United but it is
(11:36):
all the colors, uh that might make it more appealing
to some people. The United States did not have a
flat out nationwide margarine prohibition, but it did have an
ongoing feud between the butter and margarine industries, and that
feud went on for almost a century. The first margarine
factory in the United States was opened by the US
Dairy Company in eighteen seventy four. That was the year
(11:57):
after it bought meg muris s patent, and within ten
years there were almost forty different American companies making margarine.
The dairy industry, unsurprisingly was not happy about this at all.
The dairy industry was afraid that number one, people were
going to switch to marjarine across the board, and number
two that poor people switching to marjarine would put the
(12:19):
smaller butter makers that made like a lower grade, less
expensive butter out of business. Number three in the dairy
industries list of fears was that people were going to
fraudulently sell margarine labeled as butter, as had been a
concern in Europe. Correct, and that last fear was absolutely justified.
Manufacturers were making and selling marjarine in large quantities, which
(12:42):
unscrupulous people were divvying up and repackaging and selling as butter.
Just one of many many examples which was described in
an eighteen seventy seven New York Times article quote. Christopher Strauss,
Grosser of number sixteen Second Avenue, was arraigned before Justice
Murray in the fifty seven eat Police Court yesterday, charged
with selling Oleo margarine, representing it to be pure butter.
(13:06):
Say Churchill, a former manufacturer of the artificial article and
who is now employed as a detective by the Butter
and Cheese Exchange, appeared as complainant. I just want to
highlight the fact that there was a butter and cheese
exchange that had a detective. I feel like there is
a wonderful historical fiction novel to be had there. Yep.
So this threat of fraud also applied to American exports
(13:28):
of butter, which was caused for concern in the butter
industry to American butter exports and quote spurious compounds resembling butter,
we're discussed in the British House of Commons on April one,
eight one. One inspector was cited as saying forty out
of every one hundred casks of butter he inspected did
not contain butter. The superintendent of Manchester and Salford Markets
(13:51):
was quoted as saying, quote, I see used thirteen tubs
of butter at a wholesaler confectioner's bakery. That was the
most filthy stuff a man noble, stunk fearfully and was
of many colors. It's likely that a lot of these
claims of quote spurious compounds were inflated or really were
butter that had just gone rancid in transit. Even so,
(14:15):
butter fraud really was a very real problem. However, a
lot of the dairy industries other complaints about margarine and
claims that they made to try to discourage people from
eating margarine were to be very candid, extremely hypocritical. Margin
margarine was decried as inferior, made of poor quality ingredients
and likely to be contaminated. Since some of margarine's ingredients
(14:38):
were byproducts of animal slaughter, the butter industry claimed it
was made of things that were really garbage and not
meant for human consumption. Uh. Margin was kind of described
the way we would describe hot dogs todays, being like
made of scrapings. There were comparisons to margarine being no
better than melting the burned out stub of your candle
(14:58):
in than eating that. Meanwhile, marjorine manufacturers were inviting inspectors
and legislators and consumers to just come tour their factories
any time unannounced, to see that they were indeed clean
and that their ingredients were wholesome. However, at this time,
the butter industry was just on the cusp of becoming
more standardized. For its whole history, butter had mostly come
(15:21):
not from dedicated dairy farms, but from small farms with
one or two cows whose milk was made into butter seasonally.
There was really no consistency and how good this butter
was or how high it's quality was. It kind of
depended entirely on how healthy the cow was and how
well it was cared for. As well as on the skill,
attention to cleanliness, and promptness of the person making it.
(15:43):
In other words, sure, a dirty factory could crank out
adulterated margarine, but a dirty farm kitchen could crank out
adulterated butter just as easily. The dairy industry also put
out a massive campaign portraying marjarine as an inferior artificial
product made in a factory. The fact that it was
from a factory, man made, and something made it somehow
(16:05):
automatically bad. And this came up again and again. In
eighteen seventy seven, Minnesota Governor Lucius Hubbard spelled it out
this way, quote, the public has been victim of various
impositions practiced in different departments of its industry. But I
think it will be admitted that the ingenuity of depraved
human genius has culminated in the production of oleomargarine and
(16:28):
it's kindred abominations. But at the same time, the centrifugal
cream separator was introduced in eighteen seventy eight, just four
years after the first marjarine factory was open, and this
was a device that could automatically remove the cream from
milk and from there it could be made into butter.
The centrifugal cream separator was really only cost effective in
(16:50):
an industrial setting using large batches of milk. So just
as the marjarine industry was really becoming established in the
United States, the dairy industry is also on this anti
factory campaign while simultaneously moving from small batch farm butter
to large batch creamery butter, which was made in a factory.
(17:12):
Factories were evil. Let's build some uh. And the last
big hypocrisy in the dairy industry's campaign against margarine was coloring.
Margarine made from nineteenth century methods was white and it
looked kind of like lard. Most manufacturers colored at yellow,
both to look more appetizing and two more resembled butter,
since margarine was basically being touted as a butter substitute.
(17:36):
The dairy industry, on the other hand, insisted that margine
that the margarine industry's practice of coloring the product yellow
was bad, both deceptive, and unwholesome. So the dairy industry
lobbied for laws against yellow margarine. But there's the thing.
When cows eat grass, butter that's made from the milk
they produced tends to be very yellow. Because of all
(17:57):
the caroteen in what the cows were eating. But if
the cows are fed corn or other feed that doesn't
have that much caroteen, the butter made from their milk
is much much paler. So the dairy industry was already
coloring butter yellow when it demanded that the margarine industry
stopped doing that. And their argument was that the dairy
(18:18):
industry's own use of yellow coloring was simply a minor tweak,
while the margarine industries used to the same color was
an outright deception. All of these efforts on the part
of the dairy industry led to a ton of laws
and just ridiculous number of Supreme Court cases, which we
will talk about after another sponsor break. So to get
(18:46):
back to the story of margarine, and we're now going
to get into just a a shocking amount of time
and effort spent in the legal world with margarine. After
margarine was introduced in the United States in eighteen seventy four,
the push to regulate it started almost immediately. The National
Association for the Prevention of Adulteration of Butter was formed
(19:08):
in eighty two. That was a real thing, and by
eighteen eight six, twenty seven states had marjarine laws on
their books. Twenty of these states required marjarine to be
labeled specifically as margarine, and then Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,
and Ohio band marjarine outright. I can't help but think
(19:31):
about the fact that there's a lot of dairy industry
in those are uh. That year President Grover Cleveland signed
the Oleo Margarine Act into law, and with that marjarine
manufacturers had to pay six hundred dollars, wholesalers four hundred
and eighty dollars, and retailers forty eight dollars for the
privilege of selling margarine, making it of being in the
(19:56):
marjarine pipeline. Sure consumers had to pay attacks two cents
per pound on margarine that they purchased. So that's not
a lot of time that elapsed between when margarine was
introduced in the United States and when we had a
national law with taxes. Although the dairy industry which was
focused well, I mean largely in the Midwest, not just
(20:18):
the Midwest, but the big part of the Midwest, this
was hugely in favor of this law. The South, home
to the Soy and cotton seed farms that were supplying
the marjarine industry with oils were not so much in
favor of the law. Also opposed to it were people
who felt like this was the first step down a slippery,
slippery slope of the federal government needlessly regulating private business.
(20:40):
There were a lot of people who were terrified that
the government was just going to start regulating everything. Even
though the Oleo Margarine Act had been touted as something
that would curtail the practice of margarine fraud, that fraud
actually got worse after this act went into effect. There
was more deliberate mislabeling of march are in as butter
(21:01):
in an effort to evade those taxes instead of less.
Running alongside all of these taxes and prohibitions were laws
about margarine's color sounds we talked about before the break
at this at this point in history, margarine in it's
originally made state was like white and lardie looking. Multiple
(21:21):
states outlawed yellow margarine. Specifically, in eighteen eighty four, Vermont
passed a law that margarine sold there had to be
dyed pink coorayt yep. That's for holly. Holly's margarine in
New Hampshire and West Virginia followed suit see I to
see you making all kinds of beautiful pink sauces the
(21:42):
princess food. I mean that seems obvious. I wish it
were butter, but that's just because I like some butterfat.
The move to regulate marjarine color increased dramatically over the
next few decades. By nineteen o two, thirty two of
the then forty five states had regulation about margarine color,
many of them banning yellow margarine, and some of them,
(22:04):
like Vermont, had already done mandating that it be dyed
colors other than yellow. That same year, the Oleo Margarine
Act of eighteen eighty six was amended in what was
known as the Grout Bill, named after William Wallace Grout
of Vermont. This bill so it's hard to say some
of today's episode with a straight face. This bill raised
(22:27):
the tax on colored margarine from two cents a pound
to ten cents a pound. Meanwhile, the tax on uncolored
margarine's the white margarine, was dropped to a quarter of
a cent per pound. Those licensing fees that had been
part of the original Oleo margarine law were also reduced
dramatically for the manufacturers, distributors, and retailers who handled only
(22:49):
uncolored margarine, and that nineteen o two amendment also set
the regulation that any margarine being shipped from one state
to another was subject to the laws of the destination state.
This changed the world of margarine manufacturing dramatically. By nineteen fourteen,
fewer than one thousand retailers were selling colored margarine compared
(23:12):
to more than sixty two thousand who, at least according
to their records, were only selling uncolored margarine. There's a
lot of at least in that at least according there
was still a lot of margarine fraud happening. However, enforcement
on all of us was extremely difficult, since the colored
here related only to the artificial color that was being
(23:33):
added when the product was made. Manufacturers started getting around
that law by selling white margarine with this little capsule
of yellow food dye that could be worked through the product,
and then eventually selling margarine in these needable bags to
make that step a lot easier. So you would like
you would break the little capsule with it in the
sealed up bag, and then you would mash it all
(23:55):
through the bag until it was all yellow. This sort
of surprises me. And here is why. So you would
think that the reason they were coloring it yellow in
the first place was to make it more salable, like
it was more appealing than something that just looked like
a slab of lard. But if you're then selling the
thing that looks the way that they were concerned, would
(24:16):
not be appealing with a d i y yellow like
you still know that it's that. I think then maybe
did it bump up because it became a fun kitchen crack.
A lot of it was because it just does not
look very yummy to spread lard on your toast. Yeah,
A lot of it had to do with like the
visual presentation once it actually got to your dinner table,
(24:40):
it looks it just it does not. The idea of
slathering something that looks like crisco on my toast sounds
pretty gross to me. Yeah, I put some people be
into it. But then in hydrogenation was discovered and hydrogen
eating a natural yellow oil retained a lot more of
that yellow color than previous methods for making margarine. In
(25:03):
the federal government applied the ten cents of pound tax
to naturally yellow margarine made with hydrogenated oils, and in
ninety three, federal law defined quote colored margarine as anything
containing quote more than one point six degrees of yellow
on the love bond tentometer. That's a great band name
to bond tentometer. I'd go see them. All of these
(25:29):
prohibitions and taxes and regulations wound up leading to multiple
Supreme Court cases. So in addition to Congress spending lots
of time and energy the note passing laws about how
many degrees of yellow made colored margarine, the Supreme Court
was in on this action. To you, just as some examples,
and I'm I'm serious, these are just examples. There are
(25:50):
lots lots more than these examples. Powell versus Pennsylvania in
eighty eight questioned police power to enforce a law that
said no one could have marjorine under Fourteenth Amendment equal
protection grounds. The fourteenth Amendment. Just to be clear, like
the fourteenth Amendment is the amendment people have been talking
(26:12):
about about, like whether children with disabilities have the right
to be educated in the same classroom as children who
were not disabled, or whether whether like brown brown versus Board,
that was a Fourteenth Amendment case. The core unanimously ruled
that the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection clause did not apply
(26:32):
to buying margarine. What what as a ridiculous, ridiculous use
of the Fourteenth Amendment? Yeah? Uh, Shahlenberger versus Pennsylvania in
dealt with Rhode Island's attempt to export margarine to Pennsylvania,
where it was banned. The Supreme Court did not uphold
(26:55):
this import ban, saying that a state couldn't ban the
import of a normal, federally town next product. Yeah. I
don't think this would have flown if there had not
been a federal tax at that point. But the fact
it was like, Okay, you can't, you can't have it
at the state level, banning a product that is taxed
at the federal level was like how the Supreme Court
approach this. Collins versus New Hampshire also in eighteen ninety eight,
(27:17):
dealt with the New Hampshire law that required all margarine
sold in the state to be pink, including margarine imported
from out of state. This one was also found to
be unconstitutional, with the decision including quote where the state
has not the power to absolutely prohibit the sale of
an article of commerce like OLEO margarine in its pure state.
(27:40):
It has no power to provide that such articles shall
be colored or rather discolored, by adding a foreign substance
to it. I think we should bring back the pink
margarine law, but that's just me plumbly. Versus Massachusetts was
in eighteen ninety four and it related to the Massachuset
Sits ban on yellow margarine, which the court upheld as
(28:03):
constitutional because it was not a wholesale ban on margarine,
just on yellow margine. These are just examples. Uh, there
were a whole bunch of other Supreme Court cases about
margarine as well, and about taxes on it, and about
the licensing if you use, and the colors, and interstate commerce,
like the I read an article that was about barriers
(28:24):
to interstate commerce, and it was sort of listing off
all of these societal things that create barriers and interstate
commerce where states laws are incompatible with, like shipping products
across the state lines, and margarine was listed as a
barrier to interstate commerce. These federal laws about margarine crimes. Also,
(28:44):
we're not just an idle threat. At least four men
served time in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary for margarine infractions. At
least one of them more than once, including evading the
margarine tax and selling fake margarine. I have to think
if somebody asked what you're in for and you say
marjarine fraud, you're not going to really have much like
(29:05):
toughness cred now I'm thinking now main fraud. So all
of this anti marjarine fervor in the United States started
to shift during both of both of the World Wars,
when dairy was needed for the war effort, and also
during the Great Depression, when marjarine's cheapness was a really
big selling point. During the nineteen twenties, marjarine manufacturers also
(29:26):
stops trying to present their product as an alternative to
butter and sort of labeling it as basically a delicious
spread and cooking ingredient that was yummy and wholesome on
its own merits. Marjarine gradually lost its association with being
a product for poor people, and the marjarine industry gradually
organized itself into a more effective lobbying body, including forming
(29:49):
the National Association of Marjarine Manufacturers. Then, as the dairy
industry had done back in the eighteen eighties, the marjarine
industry started lobbying for the Oleo Margarine Act to be overturned,
and it was aided by a steep increase in the
price of butter. President Harry Truman signed the Margarine Act
of nineteen fifty repealing the eighteen eighty six legislation. However,
(30:12):
individual states still had their own rules about margarine and
how it was taxed and colored. Wisconsin was the last
state to overturn its laws banning yellow margarine in nineteen
sixty seven. Uh And and also of all the states
had the most and the strictest margarine laws. It was
illegal in Wisconsin to sell an even use colored margarine.
(30:34):
If you wanted to go outside the state of Wisconsin
and buy colored margarine and bring it back, you were
supposed to get a consumers permit to do that, and
record all of your purchases and pay a six cents
a pound tax on those purchases every six months or
every three months. Sorry. Uh. That was a vastly unpopular program.
Nobody really wanted to do it. At its peak, only
(30:55):
a hundred and twenty annual licenses had been sold, which
was in nineteen fifty four. There were definitely way, way,
way more people crossing the state line to buy yellow
margarine in that year. Um, people sort of tried to
work their minds around the fact, uh or or consider it.
Probably they wouldn't get arrested because the law specified that
it was illegal to use colored margarine, not to own it,
(31:19):
So you would maybe only get arrested if the officer
confiscated your lunchbox. I saw margarine on your sandwich. But
are you just gonna I don't know. Maybe you're going
to tell the police leave the margarine somewhere and not
consume it. Maybe you're just going to tell you the
(31:40):
police that you're margarine is just for show your collector
like hants house, I'm a margarine collector. This is part
of my museum. Uh yeah, I'm I'm really head scratching
on that one. If that's like how you kind of
morally walk yourself through, It's okay, It's okay, it's like
but is it like I have your cake and eat
(32:02):
it too, where you eat the margarine and then you
neither you don't own it even anymore? I don't understand.
Even so, most of the stories about smuggling margarine are
about bringing it to Wisconsin in from neighboring states. As
they repealed their own bands on yellow margarine. Service stations
at the state line, stalked up on it, and friends
and neighbors formed networks where they shared the responsibility of
(32:25):
making the trip and traveling back with a trunk full
of contraband. Wisconsin continues to van margarine in public places
unless specifically asked for an attempt to overturn that in
two thousand eleven, I did not misread that that's two
thousand eleven failed. I tried to confirm that that is
definitely still a case. And if you live in Wisconsin
(32:46):
and you know that it's not, then you can just
let us know. Yeah, because I went on a hunt
for that information had a hard time with it. Uh.
There are some really great first person accounts of people
who like remember waking up on Saturday morning and their
mom and all of their mom's friends would be sitting
around the table, uh like like like having the conversation
(33:10):
about whose turn it was to drive to Illinois, uh
and who paid for gas last time, And then they
would come back with this trunk full of margarine and
then put all the kids to work like needing it
so that the yellow would be worked through before they
distributed it to all of their neighbors. It was a
whole I think you mean to all the other collectors. Yes,
because they were not going to use this margarine, they
(33:33):
were just going to own it. Of course, now today,
years later, both butter and margarine have still been on
the receiving end of negative health associations. In the years
since the nineteen sixties, when Marjorie became a lot more legal,
margarine got a lot of negative publicity because of transpats,
that whole hydrogenation process that made it possible to make
(33:55):
margarine that was already yellow not actually very good for you,
and a lot of ways. And then both butter or
butter has gotten a lot of bad publicity because of
saturated fats, And then both of them have been decried
as terrible because of the general trend towards fat free
and low fat foods, although there is just an increasing
(34:16):
body of evidence that this whole fat free, low fat
food trend is not actually healthier. Oh, you need some
fat put butter you Okay, Your brain is made out
of fat, literally, and all of your cellular membranes also
made out of fat, so you need it in your diet. Yeah,
And also just for happiness. That too, make sure fred
taste good anyway, butter versus, I am still astonished that
(34:42):
that much time and effort within the Supreme Court was
spent arguing about margin margarine. The longer we work on
this podcast, the less and less I'm shocked by the
things that have gotten to the Supreme Court. Yeah, in arduous,
angry legal battle, right right, But if you're I guess,
in the industry, there's a lot on the line, even
(35:05):
though to us it seems silly. Yeah, there were a
lot of a lot of people who were like, you
were keeping especially people who are who don't have a
lot of money, You're keeping them from buying this like
totally wholesome food product. And the dairy industry would be like,
it is made from candle wax, and really, I mean,
we have to bring back pink margarine. That actually did happen.
(35:28):
There was a there was like sort of a I
don't remember which of the many many margine manufacturers it was,
but they made like a squeezable margarine that was sort
of marketed as being for kids, and it came in
pink and I think green or something. It came in
two colors. Uh, I remember that for ketchup? Yeah, I
(35:48):
don't remember for margarine. But now I'm just my brain
is like, oh, just get some butter and start your
route with your butter and your flour and then add
beat juice and you can make a pink sauce that way.
Like I'm off, I'm making pink. But I have some
I have some friends who make compounded margarine, not compounded margine.
They make compounded butter. I don't know why I just
said margarine, but so they'll like work all kinds of
(36:11):
delicious herbs, or they made a bloody mary compounded margin.
What I know, that's not that's not your jam, but
it is. It is my jam to have like bloody
mary seasonings in the butter. It was great. You're making
the worst, most disgusted face. So anyway, I'm just like
a Martini margarine or a Martini compounded butter. It would
(36:35):
not surprise me anyway. So I am imagining that if
you wanted, there is a similar compounding method that you
could use to color your better. Yeah, for sure, Like
I said, beat juice, it's probably something I'm interested about it.
Thank you so much for joining us today for this
(36:56):
Saturday Classic if you have heard any kind of email
address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the
course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might
be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again.
You can now reach us at history podcasts at i
heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media
at missed in History and you can subscribe to our
(37:16):
show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app,
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. Uh. Not too long ago, as this
pandemic began, we dropped a playlist of offbeat history episodes
into our fee just as a lot of folks in
the US as well as other places, we're really starting
to face the possibility of being isolated at home for
a while. And after we did that, a couple of
people noted that it seemed odd that such a playlist
(00:22):
did not include one of our most offbeat episodes, and
one that I know is one of Tracy's very favorite,
Butter versus Margarine. It is, And the real reason that
that wasn't on there is that when I pulled that
list together, we were trying to stick to episodes that
were more than a year old and that had not
been re released as a classic in at least a year.
And I could have sworn we had done Butter versus
(00:44):
Marjarine recently. Uh maybe I was really thinking of Peanut Butter.
I don't know. It was kind of a weird week
and we were all just trying to get through it,
so by popular requests, I too thought we had run
it more recently. Here's Butter Versus March Rain, which originally
came out on August one, Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(01:09):
in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and
I'm Holly Frying. This time last year, my apartment was hot.
I like, how while we have recorded today, because we'd
(01:30):
record an other thing, many things at once, the heat
has come up many times. It has been a long
stretch of and above, which sounds like Heaven to me.
But I know I'm a weirdo. We don't have air conditioning. UH,
So it was hot. I was looking at a very,
very dark and heavy short list of podcast topics to cover. Uh.
(01:50):
And when this happened last year, the result of my
quest to find something that was cool and pleasant to
talk about was good humor versus pops popsicle. Uh. The
exact same thing is happening as we speak right now,
and it has brought us to today's topic of butter
versus Margarine. So unlike the popsicle episode, which involved this
handful of businesses and their ongoing legal battles about who
(02:12):
could get to make which frozen treats, this one is
about whole industries and entire governments and just a really
weird preoccupation with protecting people from the nefarious horrors of
margarine way before people were making it with the hydrogenated
oils that led to its like more unhealthy reputation in
more recent years. There's even bootlegging involved in this whole story,
(02:34):
So big props to our colleagues at house Stuff Works
now for the Ridiculous History series, which is a series
of articles about weird things in history, and it's home
to the article that inspired today's show, which is delightfully
entitled Land of Fakes Margarine bootlegging in Canada. And as
was the case when we talked about the history of cheese,
most of the stories about where butter came from our
(02:56):
probably apocryphal. All of the English words for butter trace
back to Latin, with the Greek origins purportedly stemming from
the words for ox or cow and cheese, although there's
some debate about all that. So grain of salted uh.
There are various tales about nomadic people's whether they were
European or Western Asian, traveling with pack animals possibly camels,
(03:20):
and the milk slashing around in skins turning into butter.
Similar stories go with the cheese Yale milk in a
skin and it came out as cheese because Rennet like,
that's the cheese origin story. Uh. This story, for better
makes logical sense because butter is made when milk or
cream are agitated in some way, usually by being shaken up,
returned until the fat coagulates and then these fatty solid
(03:42):
bits can be pressed into delicious butter and butter milk
is was left behind, and a number of early cultures
did store liquids in skins and also simultaneously traveled with
them on pack animals, so it's possible that's what happened
all the same, though it's just about impossible now to
determine the exact birthplace and time of butter because it
(04:02):
all melted, not all of it, not all of it
because this next bit, or if they were traveling with
me because I ate it. Thanks to written records in archaeology,
we do know that butter has existed for at least
five thousand years, and we do have some actual samples,
so my smart alocky comment does not apply. We have
(04:25):
actual samples of incredibly old butter thanks to Ireland's Pete Bogs.
As early as three thousand BC, people living around those
bogs buried butter, often in a wooden vessel, but sometimes
in a skin or a croc or some other container
in the bog. We're not sure this was a if,
this was a preservation technique or an offering or some
(04:46):
completely other purpose. But thousands of years later, people are
still stumbling onto these long buried deposits of butter, and
some of which are really tallow or something else that's
fatty and waxy. Some of it's basically better there it
usually smells really rancid. So don't fancy don't don't eat
bog butter, Margarine, that's the shirt I want. Don't eat
(05:07):
bog butter. Okay, He's kind of like, don't eat the
yellow snow, don't eat the bog butter. Just life lessons. Yeah,
so margarine, on the other hand, much easier pedigree to trace.
At the eighteen sixty six World's Fair, Emperor Louis Napoleon
the Third, who was nephew to Napoleon Bonaparte, announced that
he wanted a substitute for butter that could benefit poor
(05:28):
people and the French military. So the price of butter
had almost doubled in the two decades leading up to
this announcement, it was just way too expensive for a
lot of people in France to afford. And it was way,
way way too expensive to just serve it up to
France's armed forces. Cost way too much money. The French
War Office offered a cash prize to the person who
(05:49):
could solve this problem. The idea wasn't just to make
something that might taste good enough to tempt people to
spread it on their bread instead of butter. It needed
to work as a substitute for butter and cook king
and ideally it needed to be less perishable than butter,
which turns rancid pretty quickly when it's not kept cold,
and it needed to have some dietary value in the
(06:10):
form of fat and calories. French chemist Epolite mes Mourrier
took the prize in eighteen sixty nine with a spread
herble emulsion of beef, tallow and water turned together with
a little bit of milk for flavor, and it met
all the right criteria. Was a dietary source of fat
and calories that had a sort of buttery taste, and
it was cheap. It costs as little as half the
(06:31):
price of butter. He called it oleo margarine, probably more
like oleo margarine in French with my terrible French accent.
This came from the Latin oleum for beef fat and
the Greek the Greek margarite for pearl. There are also
some sources that say that this came from margaric acid,
which was at the time believed to be a fatty
acid head that was heavily present and milk. But all
(06:54):
of the chemistry involving that at the time was just wrong.
My mother, who was very good cook, her mother was French,
and you know, even well into the nine nineties, my
mom would call margarine olio. Yeah, olio was what it
was called in a lot of places. Mesh Mourier patented
(07:16):
his invention and eventually sold his patent to Dutch buttermaking
company Urgans Jurgen's would eventually go on to become part
of Unilever, which, by total coincidence, now also owns the
popsicle brand. Because everything is connected in some weird full circle.
Mesh Mourier was granted a U S patent in eighteen
seventy three, which he sold to the US Dairy Company.
(07:37):
He was granted patents in a few other nations as well.
All these patents make it sound like he became successful
off of this invention. He really didn't make a lot
of money off of it, though. Margin didn't really take
off in Europe. France, of course, is famous for its
very buttery cooking, and French chefs and citizens were just
not too excited about swamping butter for a spread invented
(07:57):
by a chemist which people thought of as artificial. Also
didn't catch on quickly in other European nations either, and
most of the laws that were passed relating to it
in Europe were just devoted to trying to prevent people
from fraudulently selling margarine labeled as butter. By eighteen eighty seven, Germany,
for example, had enacted a margarine law mandating very clear
(08:19):
label labeling and separate displays for margarine and butter in
shops right on. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United
States all took steps to regulate margarine. So marjarine story
(08:42):
in Canada is pretty straightforward. Canada had a total marjarine
prohibition from eighteen eighty six until nineteen forty nine, with
one brief window from nineteen seventeen until ninety two because
of dairy and butter shortages during World War One. That
brief window did not reopen during World Were two, though,
because at that point the government dealt with these shortages
(09:03):
through rationing rather than by temporarily allowing people to buy
artificial butter. The reason for Canada's prohibition was that was
that marjarine was viewed as an injurious product that people
needed to be protected from. However, for decades after marjarine's invention,
Newfoundland wasn't yet part of Canada, and in Newfoundland things
(09:23):
were quite different. The climate there didn't make cattle farming
easy at all. You would basically have to keep your
cows inside for much of the year, and consequently most
dairy products, including butter, had to be imported. I'm just
going to make a little side note that every time
we say Newfoundland on the podcast, we get a different
video with a different correct pronunciation. So I'm just putting
(09:45):
that out there. If you were about to type us
an email, just save your time. Right. So, Newfoundland welcomed margarine,
and since it was so much easier to make margarine
there than to raise cows, it developed its own margarine industry.
Marjarine was also an important part of the diets of
many Newfoundlanders, and thanks to its calorie calorie and fat
(10:05):
content enriched marjarine even became part of a specific government
effort to combat malnutrition. People from Canada who wanted marjarine
during this whole Canadian prohibition would smuggle it in, either
from Newfoundland or from the United States. All that together
means that during the Union between Newfoundland and Canada in
(10:27):
ninety nine, marjarine became a problem. Canada's laws did not
allow a product to be legal in one province and
illegal in others. So even if Newfoundland had just started
importing butter from the other provinces, it would be way
more expensive than marjarine. Plus, nobody really wanted to destroy
Newfoundland's existing marjarine industry, so the nineteen forty nine British
(10:52):
North America Acts spelled out that Newfoundland could keep making
margarine like this is This is really basically the Act
of union between these nations to become one nation had
a part in it about about margarine. Eventually, the Supreme
Court of Canada ruled that margarine was no longer an
injurious product product and left regulation up to the provinces,
(11:12):
which individually repealed their margarine bands and more gradually repealed
laws that specified that the margarine had to be a
specific color. The last of those was actually repealed in
Quebec in two thousand and eight. Very recently. We're going
to talk more about colors of margarine a little later.
Pink and purple. Uh No, the United but it is
(11:36):
all the colors, uh that might make it more appealing
to some people. The United States did not have a
flat out nationwide margarine prohibition, but it did have an
ongoing feud between the butter and margarine industries, and that
feud went on for almost a century. The first margarine
factory in the United States was opened by the US
Dairy Company in eighteen seventy four. That was the year
(11:57):
after it bought meg muris s patent, and within ten
years there were almost forty different American companies making margarine.
The dairy industry, unsurprisingly was not happy about this at all.
The dairy industry was afraid that number one, people were
going to switch to marjarine across the board, and number
two that poor people switching to marjarine would put the
(12:19):
smaller butter makers that made like a lower grade, less
expensive butter out of business. Number three in the dairy
industries list of fears was that people were going to
fraudulently sell margarine labeled as butter, as had been a
concern in Europe. Correct, and that last fear was absolutely justified.
Manufacturers were making and selling marjarine in large quantities, which
(12:42):
unscrupulous people were divvying up and repackaging and selling as butter.
Just one of many many examples which was described in
an eighteen seventy seven New York Times article quote. Christopher Strauss,
Grosser of number sixteen Second Avenue, was arraigned before Justice
Murray in the fifty seven eat Police Court yesterday, charged
with selling Oleo margarine, representing it to be pure butter.
(13:06):
Say Churchill, a former manufacturer of the artificial article and
who is now employed as a detective by the Butter
and Cheese Exchange, appeared as complainant. I just want to
highlight the fact that there was a butter and cheese
exchange that had a detective. I feel like there is
a wonderful historical fiction novel to be had there. Yep.
So this threat of fraud also applied to American exports
(13:28):
of butter, which was caused for concern in the butter
industry to American butter exports and quote spurious compounds resembling butter,
we're discussed in the British House of Commons on April one,
eight one. One inspector was cited as saying forty out
of every one hundred casks of butter he inspected did
not contain butter. The superintendent of Manchester and Salford Markets
(13:51):
was quoted as saying, quote, I see used thirteen tubs
of butter at a wholesaler confectioner's bakery. That was the
most filthy stuff a man noble, stunk fearfully and was
of many colors. It's likely that a lot of these
claims of quote spurious compounds were inflated or really were
butter that had just gone rancid in transit. Even so,
(14:15):
butter fraud really was a very real problem. However, a
lot of the dairy industries other complaints about margarine and
claims that they made to try to discourage people from
eating margarine were to be very candid, extremely hypocritical. Margin
margarine was decried as inferior, made of poor quality ingredients
and likely to be contaminated. Since some of margarine's ingredients
(14:38):
were byproducts of animal slaughter, the butter industry claimed it
was made of things that were really garbage and not
meant for human consumption. Uh. Margin was kind of described
the way we would describe hot dogs todays, being like
made of scrapings. There were comparisons to margarine being no
better than melting the burned out stub of your candle
(14:58):
in than eating that. Meanwhile, marjorine manufacturers were inviting inspectors
and legislators and consumers to just come tour their factories
any time unannounced, to see that they were indeed clean
and that their ingredients were wholesome. However, at this time,
the butter industry was just on the cusp of becoming
more standardized. For its whole history, butter had mostly come
(15:21):
not from dedicated dairy farms, but from small farms with
one or two cows whose milk was made into butter seasonally.
There was really no consistency and how good this butter
was or how high it's quality was. It kind of
depended entirely on how healthy the cow was and how
well it was cared for. As well as on the skill,
attention to cleanliness, and promptness of the person making it.
(15:43):
In other words, sure, a dirty factory could crank out
adulterated margarine, but a dirty farm kitchen could crank out
adulterated butter just as easily. The dairy industry also put
out a massive campaign portraying marjarine as an inferior artificial
product made in a factory. The fact that it was
from a factory, man made, and something made it somehow
(16:05):
automatically bad. And this came up again and again. In
eighteen seventy seven, Minnesota Governor Lucius Hubbard spelled it out
this way, quote, the public has been victim of various
impositions practiced in different departments of its industry. But I
think it will be admitted that the ingenuity of depraved
human genius has culminated in the production of oleomargarine and
(16:28):
it's kindred abominations. But at the same time, the centrifugal
cream separator was introduced in eighteen seventy eight, just four
years after the first marjarine factory was open, and this
was a device that could automatically remove the cream from
milk and from there it could be made into butter.
The centrifugal cream separator was really only cost effective in
(16:50):
an industrial setting using large batches of milk. So just
as the marjarine industry was really becoming established in the
United States, the dairy industry is also on this anti
factory campaign while simultaneously moving from small batch farm butter
to large batch creamery butter, which was made in a factory.
(17:12):
Factories were evil. Let's build some uh. And the last
big hypocrisy in the dairy industry's campaign against margarine was coloring.
Margarine made from nineteenth century methods was white and it
looked kind of like lard. Most manufacturers colored at yellow,
both to look more appetizing and two more resembled butter,
since margarine was basically being touted as a butter substitute.
(17:36):
The dairy industry, on the other hand, insisted that margine
that the margarine industry's practice of coloring the product yellow
was bad, both deceptive, and unwholesome. So the dairy industry
lobbied for laws against yellow margarine. But there's the thing.
When cows eat grass, butter that's made from the milk
they produced tends to be very yellow. Because of all
(17:57):
the caroteen in what the cows were eating. But if
the cows are fed corn or other feed that doesn't
have that much caroteen, the butter made from their milk
is much much paler. So the dairy industry was already
coloring butter yellow when it demanded that the margarine industry
stopped doing that. And their argument was that the dairy
(18:18):
industry's own use of yellow coloring was simply a minor tweak,
while the margarine industries used to the same color was
an outright deception. All of these efforts on the part
of the dairy industry led to a ton of laws
and just ridiculous number of Supreme Court cases, which we
will talk about after another sponsor break. So to get
(18:46):
back to the story of margarine, and we're now going
to get into just a a shocking amount of time
and effort spent in the legal world with margarine. After
margarine was introduced in the United States in eighteen seventy four,
the push to regulate it started almost immediately. The National
Association for the Prevention of Adulteration of Butter was formed
(19:08):
in eighty two. That was a real thing, and by
eighteen eight six, twenty seven states had marjarine laws on
their books. Twenty of these states required marjarine to be
labeled specifically as margarine, and then Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,
and Ohio band marjarine outright. I can't help but think
(19:31):
about the fact that there's a lot of dairy industry
in those are uh. That year President Grover Cleveland signed
the Oleo Margarine Act into law, and with that marjarine
manufacturers had to pay six hundred dollars, wholesalers four hundred
and eighty dollars, and retailers forty eight dollars for the
privilege of selling margarine, making it of being in the
(19:56):
marjarine pipeline. Sure consumers had to pay attacks two cents
per pound on margarine that they purchased. So that's not
a lot of time that elapsed between when margarine was
introduced in the United States and when we had a
national law with taxes. Although the dairy industry which was
focused well, I mean largely in the Midwest, not just
(20:18):
the Midwest, but the big part of the Midwest, this
was hugely in favor of this law. The South, home
to the Soy and cotton seed farms that were supplying
the marjarine industry with oils were not so much in
favor of the law. Also opposed to it were people
who felt like this was the first step down a slippery,
slippery slope of the federal government needlessly regulating private business.
(20:40):
There were a lot of people who were terrified that
the government was just going to start regulating everything. Even
though the Oleo Margarine Act had been touted as something
that would curtail the practice of margarine fraud, that fraud
actually got worse after this act went into effect. There
was more deliberate mislabeling of march are in as butter
(21:01):
in an effort to evade those taxes instead of less.
Running alongside all of these taxes and prohibitions were laws
about margarine's color sounds we talked about before the break
at this at this point in history, margarine in it's
originally made state was like white and lardie looking. Multiple
(21:21):
states outlawed yellow margarine. Specifically, in eighteen eighty four, Vermont
passed a law that margarine sold there had to be
dyed pink coorayt yep. That's for holly. Holly's margarine in
New Hampshire and West Virginia followed suit see I to
see you making all kinds of beautiful pink sauces the
(21:42):
princess food. I mean that seems obvious. I wish it
were butter, but that's just because I like some butterfat.
The move to regulate marjarine color increased dramatically over the
next few decades. By nineteen o two, thirty two of
the then forty five states had regulation about margarine color,
many of them banning yellow margarine, and some of them,
(22:04):
like Vermont, had already done mandating that it be dyed
colors other than yellow. That same year, the Oleo Margarine
Act of eighteen eighty six was amended in what was
known as the Grout Bill, named after William Wallace Grout
of Vermont. This bill so it's hard to say some
of today's episode with a straight face. This bill raised
(22:27):
the tax on colored margarine from two cents a pound
to ten cents a pound. Meanwhile, the tax on uncolored
margarine's the white margarine, was dropped to a quarter of
a cent per pound. Those licensing fees that had been
part of the original Oleo margarine law were also reduced
dramatically for the manufacturers, distributors, and retailers who handled only
(22:49):
uncolored margarine, and that nineteen o two amendment also set
the regulation that any margarine being shipped from one state
to another was subject to the laws of the destination state.
This changed the world of margarine manufacturing dramatically. By nineteen fourteen,
fewer than one thousand retailers were selling colored margarine compared
(23:12):
to more than sixty two thousand who, at least according
to their records, were only selling uncolored margarine. There's a
lot of at least in that at least according there
was still a lot of margarine fraud happening. However, enforcement
on all of us was extremely difficult, since the colored
here related only to the artificial color that was being
(23:33):
added when the product was made. Manufacturers started getting around
that law by selling white margarine with this little capsule
of yellow food dye that could be worked through the product,
and then eventually selling margarine in these needable bags to
make that step a lot easier. So you would like
you would break the little capsule with it in the
sealed up bag, and then you would mash it all
(23:55):
through the bag until it was all yellow. This sort
of surprises me. And here is why. So you would
think that the reason they were coloring it yellow in
the first place was to make it more salable, like
it was more appealing than something that just looked like
a slab of lard. But if you're then selling the
thing that looks the way that they were concerned, would
(24:16):
not be appealing with a d i y yellow like
you still know that it's that. I think then maybe
did it bump up because it became a fun kitchen crack.
A lot of it was because it just does not
look very yummy to spread lard on your toast. Yeah,
A lot of it had to do with like the
visual presentation once it actually got to your dinner table,
(24:40):
it looks it just it does not. The idea of
slathering something that looks like crisco on my toast sounds
pretty gross to me. Yeah, I put some people be
into it. But then in hydrogenation was discovered and hydrogen
eating a natural yellow oil retained a lot more of
that yellow color than previous methods for making margarine. In
(25:03):
the federal government applied the ten cents of pound tax
to naturally yellow margarine made with hydrogenated oils, and in
ninety three, federal law defined quote colored margarine as anything
containing quote more than one point six degrees of yellow
on the love bond tentometer. That's a great band name
to bond tentometer. I'd go see them. All of these
(25:29):
prohibitions and taxes and regulations wound up leading to multiple
Supreme Court cases. So in addition to Congress spending lots
of time and energy the note passing laws about how
many degrees of yellow made colored margarine, the Supreme Court
was in on this action. To you, just as some examples,
and I'm I'm serious, these are just examples. There are
(25:50):
lots lots more than these examples. Powell versus Pennsylvania in
eighty eight questioned police power to enforce a law that
said no one could have marjorine under Fourteenth Amendment equal
protection grounds. The fourteenth Amendment. Just to be clear, like
the fourteenth Amendment is the amendment people have been talking
(26:12):
about about, like whether children with disabilities have the right
to be educated in the same classroom as children who
were not disabled, or whether whether like brown brown versus Board,
that was a Fourteenth Amendment case. The core unanimously ruled
that the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection clause did not apply
(26:32):
to buying margarine. What what as a ridiculous, ridiculous use
of the Fourteenth Amendment? Yeah? Uh, Shahlenberger versus Pennsylvania in
dealt with Rhode Island's attempt to export margarine to Pennsylvania,
where it was banned. The Supreme Court did not uphold
(26:55):
this import ban, saying that a state couldn't ban the
import of a normal, federally town next product. Yeah. I
don't think this would have flown if there had not
been a federal tax at that point. But the fact
it was like, Okay, you can't, you can't have it
at the state level, banning a product that is taxed
at the federal level was like how the Supreme Court
approach this. Collins versus New Hampshire also in eighteen ninety eight,
(27:17):
dealt with the New Hampshire law that required all margarine
sold in the state to be pink, including margarine imported
from out of state. This one was also found to
be unconstitutional, with the decision including quote where the state
has not the power to absolutely prohibit the sale of
an article of commerce like OLEO margarine in its pure state.
(27:40):
It has no power to provide that such articles shall
be colored or rather discolored, by adding a foreign substance
to it. I think we should bring back the pink
margarine law, but that's just me plumbly. Versus Massachusetts was
in eighteen ninety four and it related to the Massachuset
Sits ban on yellow margarine, which the court upheld as
(28:03):
constitutional because it was not a wholesale ban on margarine,
just on yellow margine. These are just examples. Uh, there
were a whole bunch of other Supreme Court cases about
margarine as well, and about taxes on it, and about
the licensing if you use, and the colors, and interstate commerce,
like the I read an article that was about barriers
(28:24):
to interstate commerce, and it was sort of listing off
all of these societal things that create barriers and interstate
commerce where states laws are incompatible with, like shipping products
across the state lines, and margarine was listed as a
barrier to interstate commerce. These federal laws about margarine crimes. Also,
(28:44):
we're not just an idle threat. At least four men
served time in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary for margarine infractions. At
least one of them more than once, including evading the
margarine tax and selling fake margarine. I have to think
if somebody asked what you're in for and you say
marjarine fraud, you're not going to really have much like
(29:05):
toughness cred now I'm thinking now main fraud. So all
of this anti marjarine fervor in the United States started
to shift during both of both of the World Wars,
when dairy was needed for the war effort, and also
during the Great Depression, when marjarine's cheapness was a really
big selling point. During the nineteen twenties, marjarine manufacturers also
(29:26):
stops trying to present their product as an alternative to
butter and sort of labeling it as basically a delicious
spread and cooking ingredient that was yummy and wholesome on
its own merits. Marjarine gradually lost its association with being
a product for poor people, and the marjarine industry gradually
organized itself into a more effective lobbying body, including forming
(29:49):
the National Association of Marjarine Manufacturers. Then, as the dairy
industry had done back in the eighteen eighties, the marjarine
industry started lobbying for the Oleo Margarine Act to be overturned,
and it was aided by a steep increase in the
price of butter. President Harry Truman signed the Margarine Act
of nineteen fifty repealing the eighteen eighty six legislation. However,
(30:12):
individual states still had their own rules about margarine and
how it was taxed and colored. Wisconsin was the last
state to overturn its laws banning yellow margarine in nineteen
sixty seven. Uh And and also of all the states
had the most and the strictest margarine laws. It was
illegal in Wisconsin to sell an even use colored margarine.
(30:34):
If you wanted to go outside the state of Wisconsin
and buy colored margarine and bring it back, you were
supposed to get a consumers permit to do that, and
record all of your purchases and pay a six cents
a pound tax on those purchases every six months or
every three months. Sorry. Uh. That was a vastly unpopular program.
Nobody really wanted to do it. At its peak, only
(30:55):
a hundred and twenty annual licenses had been sold, which
was in nineteen fifty four. There were definitely way, way,
way more people crossing the state line to buy yellow
margarine in that year. Um, people sort of tried to
work their minds around the fact, uh or or consider it.
Probably they wouldn't get arrested because the law specified that
it was illegal to use colored margarine, not to own it,
(31:19):
So you would maybe only get arrested if the officer
confiscated your lunchbox. I saw margarine on your sandwich. But
are you just gonna I don't know. Maybe you're going
to tell the police leave the margarine somewhere and not
consume it. Maybe you're just going to tell you the
(31:40):
police that you're margarine is just for show your collector
like hants house, I'm a margarine collector. This is part
of my museum. Uh yeah, I'm I'm really head scratching
on that one. If that's like how you kind of
morally walk yourself through, It's okay, It's okay, it's like
but is it like I have your cake and eat
(32:02):
it too, where you eat the margarine and then you
neither you don't own it even anymore? I don't understand.
Even so, most of the stories about smuggling margarine are
about bringing it to Wisconsin in from neighboring states. As
they repealed their own bands on yellow margarine. Service stations
at the state line, stalked up on it, and friends
and neighbors formed networks where they shared the responsibility of
(32:25):
making the trip and traveling back with a trunk full
of contraband. Wisconsin continues to van margarine in public places
unless specifically asked for an attempt to overturn that in
two thousand eleven, I did not misread that that's two
thousand eleven failed. I tried to confirm that that is
definitely still a case. And if you live in Wisconsin
(32:46):
and you know that it's not, then you can just
let us know. Yeah, because I went on a hunt
for that information had a hard time with it. Uh.
There are some really great first person accounts of people
who like remember waking up on Saturday morning and their
mom and all of their mom's friends would be sitting
around the table, uh like like like having the conversation
(33:10):
about whose turn it was to drive to Illinois, uh
and who paid for gas last time, And then they
would come back with this trunk full of margarine and
then put all the kids to work like needing it
so that the yellow would be worked through before they
distributed it to all of their neighbors. It was a
whole I think you mean to all the other collectors. Yes,
because they were not going to use this margarine, they
(33:33):
were just going to own it. Of course, now today,
years later, both butter and margarine have still been on
the receiving end of negative health associations. In the years
since the nineteen sixties, when Marjorie became a lot more legal,
margarine got a lot of negative publicity because of transpats,
that whole hydrogenation process that made it possible to make
(33:55):
margarine that was already yellow not actually very good for you,
and a lot of ways. And then both butter or
butter has gotten a lot of bad publicity because of
saturated fats, And then both of them have been decried
as terrible because of the general trend towards fat free
and low fat foods, although there is just an increasing
(34:16):
body of evidence that this whole fat free, low fat
food trend is not actually healthier. Oh, you need some
fat put butter you Okay, Your brain is made out
of fat, literally, and all of your cellular membranes also
made out of fat, so you need it in your diet. Yeah,
And also just for happiness. That too, make sure fred
taste good anyway, butter versus, I am still astonished that
(34:42):
that much time and effort within the Supreme Court was
spent arguing about margin margarine. The longer we work on
this podcast, the less and less I'm shocked by the
things that have gotten to the Supreme Court. Yeah, in arduous,
angry legal battle, right right, But if you're I guess,
in the industry, there's a lot on the line, even
(35:05):
though to us it seems silly. Yeah, there were a
lot of a lot of people who were like, you
were keeping especially people who are who don't have a
lot of money, You're keeping them from buying this like
totally wholesome food product. And the dairy industry would be like,
it is made from candle wax, and really, I mean,
we have to bring back pink margarine. That actually did happen.
(35:28):
There was a there was like sort of a I
don't remember which of the many many margine manufacturers it was,
but they made like a squeezable margarine that was sort
of marketed as being for kids, and it came in
pink and I think green or something. It came in
two colors. Uh, I remember that for ketchup? Yeah, I
(35:48):
don't remember for margarine. But now I'm just my brain
is like, oh, just get some butter and start your
route with your butter and your flour and then add
beat juice and you can make a pink sauce that way.
Like I'm off, I'm making pink. But I have some
I have some friends who make compounded margarine, not compounded margine.
They make compounded butter. I don't know why I just
said margarine, but so they'll like work all kinds of
(36:11):
delicious herbs, or they made a bloody mary compounded margin.
What I know, that's not that's not your jam, but
it is. It is my jam to have like bloody
mary seasonings in the butter. It was great. You're making
the worst, most disgusted face. So anyway, I'm just like
a Martini margarine or a Martini compounded butter. It would
(36:35):
not surprise me anyway. So I am imagining that if
you wanted, there is a similar compounding method that you
could use to color your better. Yeah, for sure, Like
I said, beat juice, it's probably something I'm interested about it.
Thank you so much for joining us today for this
(36:56):
Saturday Classic if you have heard any kind of email
address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the
course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might
be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again.
You can now reach us at history podcasts at i
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at missed in History and you can subscribe to our
(37:16):
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