A popular Facebook post from a few years ago made the claim that "margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback ... so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter." All bullshit.
Margarine, invented 151 years ago by French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, was invented for people, not turkeys. French Emperor Louis Napoleon III had offered a prize to anyone who could come up with a cheaper substitute for butter, looking for another option for his poorer subjects and to feed the Navy, according to a 2014 article in National Geographic looking at the history of margarine.
Mège-Mouriès found a way to make a spread from beef tallow. He then sold the patent to a Dutch butter-making company, that would become part of Unilever, a multinational company that is still one of the leading producers of margarine.
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During the war years, 1940 thru 46, it was my job to mix the orange dye packet into the originally dead white margarine so it looked closer to butter...NONE of us were fooled.
ReplyDeletei have always been told that margarine was invented in WW2 as a motor oil substitute. thats what i have read.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a tyke right after WWII there were laws against selling margarine that looked yellow like butter.
ReplyDeleteMargarine looked like white lard and came in a plastic-like bag along with a capsule of yellow food color. You had to break the capsile in the bag of white margarine and knead it and squeeze it all together to make it look yellow. As a kid my job to help mom was to do the squeezing until the white lard stuff looked like yellow butter. At the time I thought it was great fun to mash and squeeze that bag of white lard.
For more info just Google "1940s white margarine in a plastic bag"
See a photo of how it was marketed here: https://tinyurl.com/1940WhiteMargerine