SPEAKER_11: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When producer Chris Berube was growing up, he spent a lot of time with his grandparents in a suburb just outside of Montreal.
SPEAKER_10: I loved those visits. But coming from English Canada, I couldn't help but notice all the subtle differences when I was in Quebec. Like how all the gas stations had this winking tired owl logo on the outside, or how the Simpsons all spoke with working class Montreal French accents.
SPEAKER_10: But this one thing really got to me. Every morning, I would sit down for breakfast and I'd get my toast. And I would look in the butter dish. And there would be margarine. Right? Okay, that's not so weird. Lots of people like margarine. But let me explain. Margarine is this spread made with vegetable oil that's supposed to closely mimic butter.
SPEAKER_04: Pass the butter please, Vicki. Vicki, the butter. Hey, what's going on? I switched from butter to imperial margarine. You mean this is margarine?
SPEAKER_10: But there was something off about my grandparents' margarine. It didn't look like butter. In fact, it kind of looked like lard.
SPEAKER_11: The reason for this was a Quebec law that prohibited yellow margarine. For years in Quebec, the faux butter spread wasn't a soft, buttery color. Instead, it was a pale grayish white.
SPEAKER_10: And as a kid, I just didn't get it. Why would anyone make a law about the color of margarine? Who cares? At the time, I wrote it off as just another specific Quebec thing.
SPEAKER_11: But it turns out the law in Quebec was just one small battle in a global 150 year war to destroy margarine and everything that it stands for. And in its fight for survival, margarine has had to reinvent itself over and over again.
SPEAKER_10: Our relationship with food is always changing. Like, I have no idea if we think eggs are good or bad at this point. But the story of margarine is particularly turbulent. Margarine has been this bellwether for different food trends and fads in our diet culture. The fickle public has gone back and forth on margarine so many times, it feels like whiplash. The story of margarine, this boring spread, is an epic saga with four dramatic chapters.
SPEAKER_05: Chapter One, A Miracle of Science
SPEAKER_11: The reason we have margarine is because of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte III. I mean, of course, right? You probably could have guessed that. In the 1860s, France was heading towards a war with Prussia, and Napoleon III had to find a cheap way to feed the entire French Navy.
SPEAKER_02: Napoleon III put out a call for an invention of a spread that could replace butter that was portable for his troops and also cheaper to produce.
SPEAKER_10: This is food historian Elaine Kostrova.
SPEAKER_02: And I am the author of Butter, a Rich History.
SPEAKER_10: A terrific name for a book.
SPEAKER_02: Seemed obvious.
SPEAKER_11: Napoleon III set up a contest with a cash prize to whoever could make the best fake butter.
SPEAKER_10: The standout was from a French chemist named Hippolyte Majmouris called Oleomargarine. Later they just dropped the oleo part.
SPEAKER_02: And this one particular chemist came up with this mixture of beef caul fat, so this kind of excess beef fat that's trimmed off, which he reduced to an oil and then mixed with milk and salt.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, the process does not sound great, but it tasted pretty good.
SPEAKER_02: Apparently it was quite palatable. I've been tempted a couple of times to try to reproduce it just to know what it tasted like, but so far I've not done that. So actually the very first margarine, certainly an animal product, not anything like the margarines we have today or have had, you know, for the last hundred years.
SPEAKER_11: Margarine had a lot going for it. It was cheaper than butter. It kind of sort of tasted like butter and it was perfect for the Navy because it could be taken on long sea voyages and it wouldn't go rancid. But the French really loved their butter. So at first margarine did not take off.
SPEAKER_10: Majmouris sold his patent in the 1870s and this could have been it for margarine. It could have become one of those thousands of food products that roll out with lots of hype and then disappear like Crystal Pepsi or Doritos Wow. But margarine found a ready market across the ocean in America.
SPEAKER_11: After the guidance of the deceptively named United States Dairy Company, margarine was introduced to Americans and shoppers were excited because around this time butter was expensive and if you didn't have money, your alternative was buying rancid butter or another product called renovated butter, which was really gross.
SPEAKER_02: Renovated butter was essentially butter that had gone bad or cream that didn't really churn correctly and they would so-called renovate it. They would process it, you know, adding more salt, some oils, you know, they were just basically put in whatever they could to make it cohesive and spreadable with little regard for taste. I mean, it was generally really nasty stuff.
SPEAKER_11: Given the truly disgusting alternatives, shoppers flocked to margarine. By 1882, New York State was producing over 20 million pounds a year.
SPEAKER_10: So rich people got to enjoy their creamy non-rancid butter and the rest of us got slightly less creamy but still non-rancid margarine and everybody was happy. Everybody except for dairy farmers. They panicked. Dairy farmers were like, wait a second, you're producing a cheaper alternative to what we're
SPEAKER_09: selling that looks exactly the same as what we're selling and to at least to some palates is indistinguishable. This is Christopher Burns. I'm an archivist at the Silver Special Collections Library at the University of Vermont and a butter historian.
SPEAKER_10: Yes, for those keeping track, I found two butter historians. Yeah, I know how to do this job.
SPEAKER_11: The butter lobby felt threatened by margarine. They weren't about to stand by and watch this upstart become the new popular bread spread. Big butter had to fight back.
SPEAKER_05: Chapter two, a public enemy.
SPEAKER_10: In the 1880s, the dairy lobby helped spread rumors and innuendo about the looming threat of margarine.
SPEAKER_02: The start of this campaign of disinformation about margarine and where it came from and what went into it. So there was this kind of lurid campaign against margarine.
SPEAKER_10: Tell me about this disinformation campaign. Like what were the crazy rumors going around about margarine?
SPEAKER_02: They mostly painted a picture of it being the slag from butcher shops.
SPEAKER_10: Here's Natalie Cook from McGill University in Montreal. She's a food historian, a food historian who sometimes talks about butter. That's right. Third butter historian. Anyway, the disinformation campaign went to some wild extremes. There were editorial cartoons that made margarine sound awful.
SPEAKER_03: Some of the earlier cartoons show these wonderful vats of oil with things being thrown into them, you know, shoes, animals, you know, the odd mouse, the sort of disgusting things that one wouldn't want to see so that it could all be boiled down into margarine. And so that was the argument. What is in this this rather ugly mess of fat?
SPEAKER_10: The campaign wasn't limited to rumors about the content of margarine. The dairy lobby also promoted stories about fraud, unethical shopkeepers who tricked their customers by pretending that margarine was butter. The butter and cheese exchange actually sent out an inspector to test suspicious products.
SPEAKER_09: This inspector goes into the store and he finds this product being sold for the same price as butter, but it's not butter and they take it to a chemist and it's, you know, shown to be not butter. So there's a lot of that going on.
SPEAKER_10: It's unclear how much butter fraud was actually happening, but the stories were effective. And soon, politicians were passing laws across America to stop the pernicious spread of margarine.
SPEAKER_11: Butter fraud became a crime in New York State and Maryland, punishable by 30 days in prison. The margarine war was getting intense. In 1884, New York State even tried to pass a full ban on margarine, but an appeals court struck that down because, come on, it's margarine.
SPEAKER_10: Other states tried banning it too with mixed success. So pro-butter politicians had an idea. If they couldn't ban margarine, maybe they could make it so unpleasant, no one would want to eat it.
SPEAKER_11: Across the country, states passed laws that required margarine to be dyed so it didn't look like butter. Some states toyed with red or even black margarine, but one color became the most prominent.
SPEAKER_03: Vermont in 1884, New Hampshire and West Virginia in 1891, all required that it be colored pink. So imagine spreading pink margarine on your bread. Talk about something very unappetizing at your morning breakfast.
SPEAKER_10: Laws about the color of margarine were on the books until the 1950s and 60s in many states. They lingered in places like Quebec into the early 2000s when I spread that white-gray margarine on my toast. Margarine color laws were completely hypocritical because food dye is used in butter all the
SPEAKER_11: time.
SPEAKER_03: Butter actually changes color at different seasons of the year. So depending on a cow's diet, obviously butter can look quite different.
SPEAKER_10: The margarine color laws served as a de facto ban in a lot of states. It just didn't make sense for manufacturers to dye some of their margarine pink and then truck it across state lines and then sell it to these customers who already thought because of propaganda that margarine was made of, I don't know, pigeon beaks or something.
SPEAKER_11: Margarine became an embarrassing thing to eat.
SPEAKER_02: It was definitely for the working class and so that's why it was such a stigma to have some awfully colored food, you know, on your plate. It just meant, oh, you're poor, you're working class. I think they were really trying to keep it out of the middle, the so-called middle class, you know, like the poor people got what they got. I think they were really trying to keep it from going any further.
SPEAKER_10: Finally, Congress got involved. They tried to kill margarine once and for all. In 1886, a bill was introduced that would require a 10-cent tax on every pound of margarine sold, a tax so big it would definitely kill the margarine industry. Butters of the bill pulled out all the rhetorical stops and put it in moralistic terms, saying margarine was unnatural and industrial while butter was pure and beautiful. Here's a quote from House member David Henderson of Iowa.
SPEAKER_13: You will find butter in the Bible from Genesis to Revelations. You will hardly find a book in the Bible that does not speak of butter. The article came to use before profane history was written. Milk and butter have been the food of man from time immemorial, and you do not need medical certificates or the resolutions of boards of trade to tell you that butter is a wholesome article of food.
SPEAKER_10: He went on like this for quite some time. Herodotus speaks of butter 460 years before the Christian era.
SPEAKER_10: And then after talking about how butter was in ancient Rome and the land of milk and honey and all this other stuff, he finally got around to margarine.
SPEAKER_10: If you haven't read Macbeth in a while, it's the double double toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble speech. Just to be clear, Eye of Newt and Toa Frog is not what margarine is made from, but I
SPEAKER_11: think you get his point.
SPEAKER_10: There was a lot of talk like this. Butter is pastoral and ancient, and margarine is basically witchcraft. It didn't matter that margarine was just a spread you put on toast. It had come to represent so much more. Ultimately, the margarine act passed, but the tax was reduced to two cents and the industry survived. Margarine was hanging on by a toe, but in the 20th century, it came roaring back.
SPEAKER_05: Chapter three, a war hero and a health food.
SPEAKER_11: In the early 20th century, margarine became more commonplace. A new process called hydrogenation made it possible to use vegetable oils in margarine instead of beef and pork fat. Sure, margarine was still a processed mystery food, but now it was a processed mystery food that was made from vegetables. Margarine also got a boost from the two world wars. First of all, there was a butter shortage during the wars, partly because men and boys
SPEAKER_02: went off to fight the wars so there was less of a workforce on the dairy farms, but also because a lot of butter was shipped to the troops. They would have actual real butter. So margarine could kind of fill the gap. Really, I mean, almost overnight, the battle against margarine just went away.
SPEAKER_10: Americans were getting a taste for margarine, and you know what? They kind of liked it. Sales went up, and in the post-war era, margarine producers spent money on luxuries like advertising and celebrity endorsements. Years ago, most people never dreamed of eating margarine, but times have changed.
SPEAKER_11: Margarine is the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt.
SPEAKER_04: Nowadays, you can get a margarine like the new Good Luck, which really tastes delicious. That's what I've spread on my toes. Good luck. I thoroughly enjoy it.
SPEAKER_10: For years, margarine sales climbed, and ads flooded the airwaves, telling consumers margarine could do all the same stuff as butter at a fraction of the price. Some of the ads didn't even reference butter by name.
SPEAKER_06: Now Imperial combines the best of both table spread, the best qualities of margarine, easy spreadability, consistent quality, and the best qualities of nature's own spread. Natural taste, natural aroma.
SPEAKER_11: Political opposition to margarine slowly melted away, and by 1967, all the American laws regulating margarine color had been repealed.
SPEAKER_10: By the 1970s, Americans were eating about 10 pounds of margarine per person every year. And as margarine became more widely adopted, it developed a new reputation. This spread used to be reviled as a mystery substance full of animal bits. But as diet culture changed, margarine became a health food.
SPEAKER_02: On the heels of the war and rationing, you have this post-war period where the issue of heart disease became something of a crisis in this country because there were so many middle-aged executives dying of heart disease.
SPEAKER_11: After World War II, a consensus formed among food scientists that saturated fats were the root cause of American heart disease. Suddenly, butter was a big no-no, and margarine took over the dairy aisle.
SPEAKER_02: It did eclipse butter in sales, and again, this was around the 70s, the 80s, so they literally changed places on the graph.
SPEAKER_10: Yes, margarine was riding high. Nothing could stop America's favorite butter substitute.
SPEAKER_05: Chapter 4. Something Stops Margarine While nutritionists were singling out animal fats, they weren't paying attention to the
SPEAKER_11: problems with vegetable oil. The hydrogenation process created a new kind of fat, called trans fat.
SPEAKER_10: By the early 2000s, pretty much everybody knew trans fats were bad for you. I think you remember the giant panic about this. ...more on that big announcement from the FDA requiring companies to phase out all trans
SPEAKER_01: fats from our food, saying this could save up to 7,000 lives a year.
SPEAKER_07: With the FDA's announcement about trans fat, you probably wonder, what are trans fats doing in our food in the first place?
SPEAKER_08: We now know those trans fats probably worse than the fully saturated fats all along, that the margarine was probably worse than the butter all along, which is why...
SPEAKER_11: Margarine producers largely got rid of hydrogenated oil, but it was too late. Today, Americans eat a lot more butter than margarine. Lando Lakes, the biggest butter producer in America, says butter sales were up 20 percent last year because of the boom in pandemic baking.
SPEAKER_10: My grandmother still has margarine in her fridge. Only now, it's yellow. In 2008, over 130 years after the first margarine laws, Quebec finally allowed yellow margarine. But it wasn't because of some big public outcry. It's because nobody cared anymore. It's hard to imagine there was a time when people tried to outlaw margarine, or share disinformation about it.
SPEAKER_11: But we shouldn't count out margarine. Recently, it's become tied to another major food trend. As people cut animal products from their diet, there's been a rise in plant-based butters. These butters are marketed with pastoral names like Earth Balance. But if you look at the list of ingredients, these so-called butters look a whole lot like margarine. The only difference is, they're vegan.
SPEAKER_10: I see this plant-based revival as the latest evolution for margarine. A way of lashing itself onto another cycle in our food culture. Margarine keeps riding this big pendulum of taste, of what we think is good for us or bad for us. And along the way, it's been a miracle of science, then a villain, then a war hero, and a health food. But above all, it's been a survivor.
SPEAKER_11: More margarine mysteries after this. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. Treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Wait now and help refugee families in need.
SPEAKER_11: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible. So I'm back with Chris Berube. And Chris, I hear you have a couple more margarine, marginalia stories for us.
SPEAKER_10: Indeed, I do, Roman. I have so much margarine knowledge that I need to spread across our listenership.
SPEAKER_11: Okay. Despite that wordplay, you can go ahead.
SPEAKER_10: Thank you. There are so many twists and turns in the story that we weren't able to get to. And one example is, did you know, Roman, in New Zealand until 1974, you needed a note from a doctor to get margarine? That's how afraid people were of its health effects. And here's the big one I'm really excited to talk about. So remember how we've been talking about the pink margarine laws and those getting repealed? And those were laws were essentially that they were making margarine manufacturers add
SPEAKER_11: artificial dyes to make them slightly less palatable so they didn't compete with butter. That's it.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, exactly right. And actually the reason those were repealed is because of the Supreme Court. So in 1898, the Supreme Court overruled a law in New Hampshire requiring margarine to be pink. And they said, quote, the state has no power to provide that margarine shall be colored or rather discolored by adding a foreign substance to it. So that struck down laws saying margarine had to be pink or red or black. But there were still laws on the books in lots of states saying margarine could not be yellow. So it's the kind of law we talked about with Quebec that was still in effect until the early 2000s.
SPEAKER_11: So the margarine had to be it's kind of like it couldn't be dyed to make it unpalatable, but it also couldn't be dyed in some places to make it more palatable, more butter like it was just the kind of pearly white substance that you encountered when you were a kid.
SPEAKER_10: That's right. And actually, Roman, the last holdout in the United States to have a law like this was Wisconsin, who had a law like this on the books until 1967. That makes sense.
SPEAKER_11: They're like the dairy state. So they could imagine that they were like extra protective of their home industry.
SPEAKER_10: So yes, to stereotype Wisconsin for a second, yes, this is why this happened. So there were these laws on the books saying you couldn't put yellow food dye in margarine. And actually, the Federal Margarine Act was amended to add this like big tax to any margarine that used yellow food dye. So producers tried to figure out ways around this. So the people who make margarine around World War One started using oils that gave margarine kind of a natural yellow color. So they weren't dying it yellow was just part of the production process. So they use coconut oil, they gave it kind of a yellowish hue. And then politicians were like, okay, we see what you're doing here. We don't like this. So then they just banned all yellow margarines, whether it was like a natural color or a food dye. They either banned it or they taxed it. And the margarine producers had to figure out another way around it. So they started sending out the white tubs of margarine with little yellow dye packs. So you could mix in the yellow color at home into your margarine. So it's like a it's like a like a home project.
SPEAKER_11: Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: It's like this family activity you can all do together where you're kind of stirring it in. And it's funny, there was actually in the 50s in Canada, there was this series of ads starring this fictional homemaker named Brenda York, who showed people how to do this, like how to do the mixing. So here's Natalie Cook. She is one of our food historians.
SPEAKER_03: She's suggesting that A, it's an economic spread for your bread. It's tasty. She's also having to make a rather difficult argument. She's having to show us in real time that it's a very pleasant activity to be massaging the nipple of dye into a rather horrible mess of margarine. And so she's wearing a white lab coat and smiling all the time as she is demonstrating that this can be done pleasantly, efficiently, quickly.
SPEAKER_10: Now I know how that sounds. It doesn't sound pleasant, efficient or quick.
SPEAKER_11: It's awful.
SPEAKER_10: It does not sound fun at all. It really doesn't. And during the process of reporting this, I actually found somebody who remembers using those dye packs who was around when they were still for sale. And one of the experts I spoke to for this story is Mary Nestle. She's a food historian. She's written quite a few books. Professor Maritus at NYU. And when I brought this up with Mary, and here's how she described the process of mixing the dye into the margarine.
SPEAKER_12: Well, you got this white block of fat and then you got a packet of food dye. And with great effort, you mix them together so it would look like butter. But people didn't want to eat it. It was awful looking.
SPEAKER_10: She told me it came out very stripey. So even if you tried to mix it together, it just never totally mixed. You could totally imagine it not working well at all.
SPEAKER_11: And you also can really tell that she seems to have a pretty strong disdain for margarine and this process. Yeah, I would say her distaste for margarine has carried over from childhood.
SPEAKER_10: Actually this is one of the first things that she said to me during the interview.
SPEAKER_12: My response to hearing that you were interested in margarine was, does anybody still eat it?
SPEAKER_10: So yeah, obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration as we were talking about. There are people for religious reasons or dietary reasons or habit who still love margarine. And the new big thing is these plant based butters, which do have a lot of similarities to margarine. So, you know, margarine, it's a survivor. It's hanging in there. It is such a fascinating story.
SPEAKER_11: So thank you so much for bringing it to us. And this little extra bit just to gross us out at the very end. Just want to give everyone a lovely image to go home with from our margarine story.
SPEAKER_10: Thanks a lot, Roman. Thanks, Chris.
SPEAKER_11: And we'll see you next time. You're listening to a podcast. Stitcher. Yeah, you're listening to- Stitcher. You're listening to a pod- Stitcher. Yeah, you're listening to a pod- Stitcher. You're listening to a Stitcher podcast. Sirius XM. Isn't that what I said?
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_11: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam, and a cool to the touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_00: At Discount Tire, we know your time is valuable. Get 30% shorter average wait time when you buy and book online. Did you know Discount Tire now sells wiper blades? Check out our current deals at DiscountTire.com or stop in and talk to an associate today. Discount Tire.
SPEAKER_08: Taking care of-
