Few foods have ever been legislated against with the vindictive creativity aimed at margarine. At various points in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was taxed punitively, licensed like a dangerous drug, banned outright in whole countries, and — in the most memorable stroke — several American states required that it be dyed pink, so that no innocent housewife could mistake the impostor for butter. The stuff being persecuted was not poison. It was simply cheaper than butter, and the world's dairy farmers understood the threat perfectly.
Margarine began, like canned food, as a French military project. In the late 1860s the government of Napoleon III offered a prize for a cheap, stable butter substitute for the army and the poor, and in 1869 the chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès patented a spread churned from processed beef tallow and skimmed milk. He named it after margaric acid, itself named from the Greek for pearl — margarites — for the pearly sheen of its fat crystals. The inventor profited little; the Dutch firm Jurgens, later one of the ancestors of Unilever, acquired the process and industrialised it, and by the 1880s margarine was pouring out of factories on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually shifting from animal fats to vegetable oils. Even the word became a battlefield in miniature: the g was originally hard, as in Margaret, and dictionaries fought a long rearguard action before surrendering to the soft-g pronunciation everyone actually used.
In America's dairy states, the response was legislative siege. Congress passed the Oleomargarine Act in 1886, slapping a federal tax on margarine and requiring makers and sellers to buy licences; later amendments taxed artificially coloured margarine at many times the rate of the uncoloured kind. The states went further. Dozens restricted or banned yellow colouring, and a handful — New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia — passed laws requiring margarine be dyed pink, on the theory that consumers deserved a visual alarm bell. The US Supreme Court struck down the pink laws in 1898, in Collins v. New Hampshire, reasoning that a state could not force a wholesome product to be made unappetising; the yellow bans, however, marched on for decades.
Bootleg butter-substitute
The result was a genuine smuggling economy. Wisconsin — "America's Dairyland", as its number plates still boast — banned yellow margarine into the 1960s, and generations of Wisconsinites drove across the Illinois state line to fill their boots with contraband spread, a practice remembered fondly as oleo runs. Restaurants serving margarine in place of butter faced fines. Manufacturers answered the colour bans with a workaround of genius: they sold white margarine with a capsule of yellow dye, leaving the customer to knead the colour through at home — a chore many households of the 1940s remembered for the rest of their lives. Wartime butter rationing swelled margarine's market share regardless, and the federal margarine taxes were finally repealed in 1950. Wisconsin held out longest, only legalising yellow margarine in 1967 — and even then it kept a law on the books requiring restaurants to serve butter unless the customer asks otherwise.
Canada's war was fiercer still. The Dominion banned margarine outright in 1886, and except for a window around the First World War the ban lasted until 1948, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled it unconstitutional. Newfoundland, which had a margarine industry of its own, took the matter seriously enough to make its protection a condition in the terms under which it joined Canada in 1949. Quebec kept a colour restriction — margarine could not be sold butter-yellow — all the way to 2008, making it the last major holdout in North America and gifting pub quizzes a date that sounds impossible.
Through it all, the actual product quietly changed and changed again: from tallow to vegetable oils, from hydrogenated fats — whose trans-fat problem eventually became its own public-health saga — to modern blends. Margarine's reputation swung with the science, worshipped by heart doctors in one decade and repudiated in the next, while butter completed a triumphant comeback as a "natural" food. The legal war, though, was never really about nutrition. It was about incumbents using the law to hobble a cheaper competitor — the clearest case study in food history of protectionism dressed as consumer protection. The tell is in the branding truce that ended it: margarine finally conquered the shelf not by defeating butter, but by impersonating it, under names that promise the customer can't believe it isn't.
Quiz nuggets
- Margarine was invented in 1869 by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, answering a prize offered under Napoleon III; the name comes from the Greek for pearl.
- New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia required margarine to be dyed pink until the US Supreme Court struck such laws down in 1898.
- The US Oleomargarine Act of 1886 taxed margarine; the federal taxes were repealed in 1950.
- Wisconsin banned yellow margarine until 1967, spawning cross-border "oleo runs" into Illinois.
- Canada banned margarine outright until 1948, and Quebec restricted its colour until 2008.