Margarine

Margarine emerged from military logistics, not culinary ambition. In 1869, France faced a butter shortage while preparing for possible war with Prussia, and Emperor Napoleon III offered a prize for an inexpensive butter substitute that could supply the armed forces and the lower classes. Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, a pharmacist-turned-chemist who had already won the Légion d'Honneur in 1861 for his work on bread-making, answered the challenge. His invention churned beef tallow with milk to create a spread he called 'oleomargarine'—from Latin 'oleum' (beef fat) and Greek 'margarite' (pearl, describing its lustrous appearance). He filed the French patent on July 15, 1869, with patents following in England, Austria, Bavaria, and the United States.

The prerequisites were specific: understanding of fats and their chemical properties, churning technology borrowed from dairy processing, and the pressure of potential military conflict that made alternatives to expensive butter economically urgent. Mège-Mouriès thought his spread contained oleic and margaric acids based on the chemistry of his time; later analysis showed it actually contained stearic and palmitic acids, but the name stuck regardless of the chemistry.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 destroyed Mège-Mouriès's plans to manufacture margarine at his facility in Poissy, France. In 1871, Dutch company Jurgens bought the patent and began manufacturing the first commercial non-dairy spread, establishing what would become a global industry. Jurgens would eventually merge with other companies to become part of Unilever. Mège-Mouriès himself died in 1880 having made almost nothing from his invention—the all-too-common fate of inventors whose creations outgrow their creators.

Margarine reached the United States in the 1870s, and within a decade, 37 companies were enthusiastically manufacturing it. The dairy industry responded with unprecedented political warfare. The 1886 federal Margarine Act imposed punitive taxes and demanded that manufacturers pay prohibitive licensing fees. Individual states went further: Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio banned margarine outright. Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota passed laws requiring margarine to be dyed an off-putting pink to make it commercially unappetizing. Other states proposed brown, red, or even black coloring requirements.

The 'margarine wars' were fundamentally color wars. Natural margarine is white—described as 'the unappetizing shade of grade-school paste.' Manufacturers wanted to tint it butter-yellow for obvious commercial reasons; dairy producers called yellow margarine fraud and deception. By 1902, 32 states had imposed color constraints. The Supreme Court eventually struck down the 'pink laws,' but the ban on yellow coloring persisted for decades. Wisconsin didn't repeal its anti-yellow-margarine law until 1967—the last state to surrender. Manufacturers adapted by selling food-coloring capsules so consumers could knead yellow dye into their white margarine at home, creating a bootleg butter-colored spread in their own kitchens.

The hydrogenation process developed around 1900 transformed margarine production, allowing vegetable oils to replace animal tallow entirely. By 1957, American per capita margarine consumption surpassed butter for the first time at 8.6 versus 8.3 pounds. Health campaigns against saturated animal fat accelerated the shift through the late twentieth century—until research in the 1990s linked trans fats from hydrogenation to heart disease, forcing yet another reformulation. Today's margarines are largely trans-fat-free, but the century of regulatory warfare between butter and margarine remains one of history's most remarkable examples of food industry political combat.