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T.W. Paterson: Move over margarine, butter is back!

As early as the 1880s, margarine was reviled as “counterfeit butter.”
web1_170419-CCI-M-Margarine
Margarine has gone through many changes in it’s long history. (Wikimedia Commons photo)

As early as the 1880s, margarine was reviled as “counterfeit butter.”

For a change, a case of history reversing rather than repeating itself.

Margarine, promoted since the 1950s as the non-dairy antidote to cholesterol, has fallen out of favour. Sales, it’s reported, are so far down that the owners of two of the largest manufactories of margarine are up for sale.

Ironically, the so-called answer to artery-clogging butter from real cows has been hoist with its own petard, as the Bard-on-Avon would put it.

But, first, let’s back up a little. I well remember when my father introduced what was called oleomargarine to the Paterson household. I was really young but it sticks in my mind because of its distinctive packaging and handling.

You have to understand that the makers of margarine were up against a well-entrenched dairy industry that bitterly resented and strenuously fought the artificial bread-spread. Typically, the politicians of the day cobbled together a compromise. So there could be no misunderstanding by consumers that they were buying margarine not butter, what was first called oleo or oleomargarine was sold without colouring.

It came, not yellow and in a plastic tub, but as white and looking much like a lump of pastry or lard, in a clear cellophane-type bag with a large orange ‘button’ in the centre. Consumers would take the bag in their hands, break the button and knead it for some time until they’d spread the orange dye (for that’s what it was) evenly throughout the margarine. The result, if you gave it sufficient effort to avoid streaks, was yellow and looked, to all intents and purposes, as it was meant to look — like butter. (But it sure didn’t taste the same to my young palate and I’ve ever remained faithful to Bossi’s best.)

Many consumers chose to buy margarine because they’d bought into the then-raging anti-cholesterol campaign (which has since been debunked); others, likely the majority, chose margarine because it was priced somewhat less than the real thing. Much as Crisco shortenings and the like were priced lower than lard. Which brings up another point: Just as I’ve always preferred the taste of butter I’ll stake my mother’s and grandmother’s pie crusts made with, horrors, lard, any day against those made with so-called shortenings.

Which brings us back to today and margarine’s fall from grace — brought about by research in recent years into hydrogenated oils and trans fats. Ironically, although many manufacturers have “reformulated their spreads sold in tubs to remove [hydrogenated oils and] trans fats…the bad health associations have persisted”. (This, despite the fact that many margarines now contain only one-third of the fat and calorie content of traditional spreads.)

This isn’t only ironic but justice! Consumers from the ’50s through the early ’90s were sold a bill of goods about the extent of harm to health of dairy products and the superiority of artificial spreads. But times have changed. According to a recent Associated Press report, people now see butter as “real” and many have come to accept more fat in their diets. Even McDonald’s, going with the flow, has switched from margarine to butter in its breakfast menu “as part of a push to improve perception of its food”.

“I think people have always been a bit suspicious about margarine,” Bonnie Liebman, director of Nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest told the AP.

Based upon my childhood introduction to ‘oleo,’ it never occurred to me that margarine goes back beyond the 1950s. In fact, it was first formulated from margaric acid and beef fat by Michel Eugene Chevreul in 1813, then refined by a second French chemist as a cheaper substitute for butter for the French army in 1869. Made mainly of refined vegetable (primarily cottonseed) oil, it became more of a vegetable oil-based spread and cooking and baking ingredient thanks to an American, Henry Bradley, in 1871. Resented by farmers, and reviled as “counterfeit butter” as early as the 1880s, a special tax was invoked to penalize its otherwise legal manufacture. Too, so that consumers wouldn’t be fooled into thinking it was the real thing, some Americans states forbade its being dyed yellow.

Nevertheless, thanks to a reduced supply of animal fats in the 1930s Depression and the Second World War, then a massive publicity campaign promoting it as being more healthful than butter, margarine continued to gain market share.

The colour restriction was lifted in 1955 and, for the first time, margarine could be sold looking like butter.

Lest you feel sorry for margarine makers, sales, for all of changing trends, still racked up $1.81 billion last year. That said, however, butter resumed its supremacy at the checkout in 2005. What a comeback.

There is a god.

www.twpaterson.com