From War Room to Living Room Sample - Margarine
France 1866. Prussia had defeated Austria in the Seven Weeks War, and now the French felt threatened by the Prussians. The French army replaced allits old muzzle-loading guns with new breech-loading rifles and even developed an early ancestor of the machine gun in preparation for war with Prussia. The popularity of their ruler, Napoleon III (1808–1873), Emperor of the French, was slipping. And now, cows were getting sick and dying. Mon Dieu! Suddenly France had a butter shortage. Would the lower classes revolt against Napoleon as the price of butter rose? What would Napoleon’s soldiers eat on their bread if they went to war?
The emperor decided to follow the lead of his great uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), who allegedly declared “an army marches on its stomach.” Great uncle Napoleon had offered a prize to anyone who could find a way to preserve food for an army on the move. This resulted in the development of canned food. In 1866, Napoleon III decided to offer a prize to anyone who could create a substitute for butter.
Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès (1817–1880), a French chemist born Hippolyte Mège, who added Mouriès to distinguish himself from another inventor named Mège, began his career as a hospital pharmacist where he modified a medication for syphilis to eliminate the pill’s unpleasant side effects. His range of interests was broad. Before he became involved in food chemistry in the mid- 1850s, he acquired additional patents in medicine, papermaking, and leather tanning.
After shifting into food chemistry, Mège-Mouriès studied bread and developed a method for making 14 percent more bread out of a fixed amount of ingredients. Although he was awarded the Legion of Honor for this discovery, the process was complicated and never caught on with bakers. Winning the Legion of Honor, however, resulted in the opportunity to do dairy research at a farm owned by Napoleon III.
At the farm Mège-Mouriès noted that starved cows produced less milk, but the milk still contained fat. From this observation, he developed the idea that he could start with animal fat, duplicate the chemical reactions that occur in the cow, and create butter.
Mège-Mouriès’s process began with beef fat. According to his 1869 patent, he crushed the fat between rollers, washed it, and digested it with gastric juice. He then used a multistep process to purify and bleach the fat. The purified fat was mixed with water, bicarbonate of soda, casein (a milk protein), mammary tissue, and yellow coloring. This mixture was heated at 104⁰F (40⁰C). When it cooled, a solid made of tiny water droplets evenly dispersed in fat settled to the bottom of the container. Mège-Mouriès called this “preserved butter.” It had the approximate taste and texture of natural butter but cost less and stayed “fresh” longer, making it useful for soldiers in the field and sailors on long voyages. Mège-Mouriès named this new product oleomargarine from the Latin oleum for beef fat and the Greek margarite for pearl because his artificial butter had a pearl-like off-white appearance. Over time, the “oleo” was dropped, and the product was simply called margarine or sometimes butterine.
The butter industry fought to keep bans and taxes on margarine, which had gained popularity when butter was rationed during World War II. Women objected and marched in Washington, DC, in 1949 to demand legislators repeal these restrictions.
Mège-Mouriès acquired patents on margarine in France and half a dozen other countries but lost control of his patent to the Dutch. In 1869, the Dutch repealed a law that recognized patents of other countries. They did not replace it with a new patent act until 1910. This allowed the Netherlands, a butter-exporting country, to exploit Mège-Mouriès’s margarine patent. It is unclear exactly how this happened. Mège-Mouriès voluntarily showed his process to Antoon Jurgens (1805–1880), a butter exporter, but it is not known whether he was paid for sharing his process with Jurgens or whether Jurgens simply appropriated Mège- Mouriès technology without compensating him.
Mège-Mouriès won Napoleon III’s prize in 1869. The next year, France declared war on Prussia. Despite having a butter substitute and new rifles, France lost the war, and Napoleon III was deposed. Mège-Mouriès never became rich from his invention and died in obscurity, but margarine took on a life of its own as it evolved into the product we know today.
History
From the discovery of fire and the start of cooking, our ancestors used animal fats. Fats are high in calories, an advantage when food is scarce (see entry “Energy Bars”—“History”). Until modern times, fats were also important in making soap and candles, but for many years, little was known about their chemistry.
Michel Chevreul (1796–1889), a man now considered the father of modern organic chemistry, preceded Mège-Mouriès in his study of animal fats. His interest was in making soap and candles, not food. Mège-Mouriès was familiar with Chevreul and his research to the extent that Chevreul personally urged Napoleon III to award Mège-Mouriès the Legion of Honor for his bread discovery. Wilhelm Heintz (1817–1880), another early chemist, discovered and analyzed many new fatty acids, the building blocks of fats, including margaric acid in 1853. The work of these two men provided a foundation for Mège- Mouriès’s research on dairy fats and his success in developing a substitute for butter.
The Netherlands was a country famed for its rich butter, but the Dutch saw profit in manufacturing lower-cost margarine, much of it for export. By some estimates, there were more than seventy margarine factories in the Netherlands in the1880s. Antoon Jurgens and Simon van den Bergh (1819–1907), leading Dutch margarine manufacturers, became rich exporting huge amounts of margarine to England and other European countries where it was bought mainly by the lower classes. Just before the First World War, the Netherlands exported more than 220,000 tons of pearly off-white margarine.
Margarine arrived in the United States in 1870. Henry W. Bradley of Binghamton, New York, received a patent in 1871 for “a new composition for lard, butter, or shortening, whereby a very cheap, consistent, and coagulate lard or butter is manufactured, and one superior to ordinary shortening, answering the purpose of lard, butter, or cream for culinary and other uses” (US patent 10,626, January 3, 1871). Bradley used a combination of cottonseed oil (normally an animal feed) and animal fat to make a butter substitute. It is unclear whether he had been working on this product before imported margarine made its US appearance. There is no record of his product achieving commercial success.
The appearance of margarine caused the American dairy lobby to howl in fury, claiming that margarine would put dairy farmers out of business and destroy the American way of life. This was a bit of an overstatement. Butter remained the partner of choice for bread. In 1879, the US exported to Europe 38 million pounds of butter compared to 32,000 pounds of margarine. New York State tried banning margarine completely in 1884, but the courts struck down the law. Later, six other states successfully banned the manufacture and distribution of what they called “artificial butter.”
The pressure on margarine was unrelenting. By 1910, thirty states had passed laws forbidding margarine to be colored yellow, claiming that consumers would confuse it with butter. Left uncolored, margarine resembled unappealing lard. New Hampshire and four other states went further and required that margarine be dyed pink. Other states proposed requiring red or black margarine to scare off consumers. Laws requiring these extreme colors were struck down by the US Supreme Court on the grounds that manufacturers could not be forced to adulterate their food products, but the anti-yellow margarine laws stayed in force for more than fifty years. As a way around the ban, white margarine was sold with a separate capsule of yellow dye that the consumer could knead into the margarine at home to make it more visually appealing. Minnesota (1963) and Wisconsin (1967) were the last states to permit the sale of yellow margarine. In Canada, the sale of margarine was completely prohibited from 1886 to 1949.
The dairy lobby continued its vigorous quest to ban or at least regulate margarine. The Federal Oleomargarine Act of 1886 defined butter, imposed a nationwide two-cent per pound tax on margarine, and required manufacturers, wholesalers, and retail margarine sellers to pay a substantial yearly licensing fee. Violating the Oleomargarine Act could result in a felony conviction. This drove many margarine manufacturers out of business, but margarine, an admittedly cheap substitute for butter, would not die.
The next big step in the production of modern margarine involved the technique of hydrogenation. This process, developed by American James Boyce (1869–1935), was made practical for industrial use by French chemist Paul Sabatier (1854–1941) who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1912. Hydrogenation uses a catalyst, often nickel or platinum, to break carbon double bonds in a fat molecule and attach a hydrogen atom to each now single-bonded carbon. In industrial use, this allows a vegetable oil such as corn, palm, or canola oil to be made into solid margarine. The process lowered production costs because it was cheaper to substitute plant oil for some of the animal fat and still produce a solid, spreadable product.
Once the First World War started in 1914, margarine consumption in Europe increased because butter was rationed. Animal fat was scarce, and most margarine was made with corn oil and other vegetable oils. Margarine was not popular. Writer George Orwell (1903–1950) associated margarine with bad character. Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) complained about eating it in his memoir. Other writers regularly associated margarine with the inferiority of the lower classes. While the upper and middle classes had little choice but to eat margarine during the First World War, it was treated as something to be endured for the duration of the war until butter became available again.
Although wealthy families switched back to butter after the war, margarine remained popular with the working class, and it made inroads into the middle class during the Great Depression (1929–41) because of its lower cost. By the time the Depression ended, the Second World War had begun, and butter, fats, and oils were rationed. Fats and oils were needed by the military to make lubricants and nitroglycerine, an explosive. The war butter ration in the UK was 2 ounces (56 g) of butter per person per week. For a period, margarine in the UK was made with whale oil. Butter rationing lasted until 1954. In the United States, butter rationing was slightly less stringent and ended in November 1945. In Germany in 1935, German chemist, Arthur Imhausen (1885–1951) created an edible oil from synthetic paraffin derived from coal. This was used in the production of margarine. Even paraffin oil margarine was a luxury, as it, like most food, was scarce in Germany during the Second World War.
Evolution to Everyday Life
During the Second World War, margarine became a sign of support for the war effort and a necessity if one wanted something to spread on toast. It was no longer associated only with the poor, but even during the war, yellow margarine in the United States remained taxed. The manufacture of yellow margarine was still banned in many states, even though natural butter with yellow dye added to improve its appearance was legal. Transporting yellow margarine across state lines was a crime. Illegal use of yellow margarine was widespread. In 1954, Wisconsin Sheriff Lyman B. Clark was prosecuted for smuggling yellow margarine from Illinois into the Outagamie County Jail to feed the inmates.
These restrictions did not match the attitudes of post-Second World War Americans. A 1948 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans surveyed used butter and 33 percent used margarine. In 1949, more than 75 percent of Americans, including 54 percent of farmers, favored repeal of the margarine tax, which had increased fivefold since the 1886 Oleomargarine Act. Women marched in Washington, DC, carrying signs that told legislators, “We Want Tax- Free Yellow Margarine.” Despite massive efforts by the dairy industry, the tax and color bans on margarine were repealed on July 1, 1950. Margarine was now part of mainstream American life. In 1959, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt made a television commercial for Good Luck margarine. In Canada, the margarine wars raged on. Despite the military need for fats during the Second World War, margarine remained illegal nationwide until 1949. In the 1950s, the province of Quebec passed laws against selling artificially colored margarine. This was done under the guise of consumer protection, as if consumers would not be able to tell the difference between butter and margarine. The province repealed these laws in 1972, reinstated them in 1987, and repealed them again in 2008.
The butter versus margarine war did not end with the removal of taxes and color restrictions on margarine. Both butter and margarine contain by law at least 80 percent fat and 20 percent water, but margarine, because it is made with vegetable oils, contains less saturated fat than butter. Saturated fats are associated with an increase in the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in the blood. LDL is generally referred to as “bad” cholesterol. As more research was done on cholesterol, physicians and dietitians began recommending that people limit the amount of saturated fats in their diet to improve heart health and prevent clogged arteries and heart attacks. Americans listened. By 1991, 63 percent of Americans reported that they most often used margarine compared to 20 percent who regularly used butter.
It looked like margarine was a clear winner in the war with butter, but the war was not over. Margarine, which by now was made exclusively with vegetable oils, undergoes a much more intensive level of processing than butter. Additional research showed a type of fats called trans fats are made when carbon bonds are broken and hydrogen atoms are rearranged during hydrogenation at high temperatures. Trans fats increase bad cholesterol and decrease high-density lipoproteins (HDL) or “good” cholesterol, while butter does not change HDL levels. High LDL and low HDL levels increase the risk of blood vessel damage and heart disease. Many former margarine users switched back to butter. The US Food and Drug Administration took this research seriously enough to ban trans fats in foods beginning on June 18, 2018.
These health concerns led manufacturers to create fat-based spreads in which some vegetable oil is added to butter or some butter is added to vegetable oil margarines. Butter consumption hit an all-time high in the United States in 2012, while margarine was at an all-time low. Butter consumption in the United States ten years later in 2022 was just over 2 billion pounds or about 6.4 pounds (2.9 kg) per person. That same year, New Zealand was the top consumer of butter at 13.6 pounds (6.2 kg) per person. Consumption of margarine and margarine spreads has continued to decline, with India and Pakistan now leading the world in per person consumption of margarine.