The story of margarine begins with a competition, an emperor, and a problem that was not primarily culinary. In 1869, Napoleon III offered a prize to anyone who could produce a cheap, stable substitute for butter that could be fed to the French navy and to the working poor. Butter was expensive. The army moved on its stomach and the poor barely moved at all. A fat that could be produced cheaply, stored without spoiling, and spread on bread was not a luxury. It was a logistics solution.
Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, a French chemist, won the competition. His entry was a substance he called oleomargarine, later shortened to margarine. The name came from margaric acid, a fatty acid that the chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul had identified decades earlier from the Greek word for pearl, because the substance had a faint iridescent sheen. Mege-Mouries patented his process and demonstrated it to Napoleon III’s committee. He won the prize. What he could not quite do was produce his invention at scale, and within a few years he had sold the patent to a Dutch company whose name would eventually become familiar to anyone who has opened a refrigerator in the twentieth century.
What the Original Margarine Actually Was
The margarine that Mege-Mouriès made was not what most people today think of when they hear the word. It contained no vegetable oil. The main ingredient was beef tallow, specifically the fat rendered from beef suet, pressed and churned with skimmed milk and water. The result was a pale, solid fat that resembled butter closely enough to pass, spread similarly on bread, and kept longer without refrigeration than butter did. It was an animal product from start to finish.
The vegetable oil version that became standard in the twentieth century came later, driven by advances in a process called hydrogenation, which allowed liquid vegetable oils to be hardened into a solid fat at room temperature. The first hydrogenated vegetable shortening reached consumers in the early 1900s. The shift from animal fat to hydrogenated plant fat happened gradually, driven by economics more than science: vegetable oils were cheaper to produce at the scale the market had come to require. The margarine Napoleon III commissioned and the margarine that lined supermarket shelves a century later shared a name and a function. The substance inside was different.
Nina Teicholz, in The Big Fat Surprise, traces the full arc of how margarine moved from obscure military supply solution to mainstream household staple, and documents in detail how the shift to hydrogenated vegetable oils introduced a form of fat, the trans fat, that had never before existed in the human food supply and would take decades to be recognized as harmful. The original margarine made from beef tallow was, by modern nutritional understanding, a less problematic product than the vegetable version that replaced it. The improvement in cost and shelf life came with a consequence that took nearly a century to understand.
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The Patent, the Dutch, and the Company Nobody Remembers
Mege-Mouriès sold his patent in 1871 to the firm of Jurgens, based in the Dutch town of Oss. The Jurgens family had been in the butter trade and understood what a stable, cheap butter substitute could mean at scale. They did not struggle to imagine the market. They built factories. They refined the process. They drove down the cost. By the late nineteenth century, margarine was being produced in quantities that Mege-Mouriès’s small workshop could not have approached.
Jurgens merged with another Dutch margarine producer, Van den Bergh, in the early twentieth century. That combined entity merged with the British soap and food company Lever Brothers in 1929. The resulting company was called Unilever. The prize entry of a French chemist who could not scale his own invention became one of the founding product lines of one of the largest consumer goods companies in the history of manufacturing. Mege-Mouriès died in 1880, before most of this happened. He had sold the patent when he needed the money.
Bee Wilson, in Consider the Fork, examines how industrial food production transformed ingredients that began as handcrafted or artisanal products into mass-manufactured goods with little resemblance to their origins, and how the technology of production shaped not just cost but character: what the food was, how it tasted, and what it meant to the people eating it. Margarine is one of the clearest examples of this transformation. The original was a chemist’s competition entry made in small batches. The twentieth-century version was produced in quantities measured in millions of tonnes by factories whose scale had no precedent in food history.
The War Against Butter (And What It Cost)
The dairy industry recognized margarine as a threat from the beginning and responded accordingly. In the United States, where margarine arrived in the 1870s, dairy lobbying produced some of the most remarkable product regulations in American food history. Several states required margarine to be dyed pink, on the theory that no one would eat a pink spread. Others banned its sale outright or taxed it heavily. Federal legislation in 1886 imposed a tax on margarine and required it to be clearly labeled.
The coloring dispute lasted into the mid-twentieth century. Natural margarine was pale yellow or white. Butter was yellow. Legislation in many American states prohibited margarine manufacturers from adding yellow coloring to their product, to prevent it from being mistaken for butter. Some manufacturers responded by including a small capsule of yellow dye in each package, which the consumer could knead into the margarine at home. This was legal. It was also an instruction to the customer to perform, in their own kitchen, the step the factory was forbidden from doing. The regulation achieved little except to give American households a task to do before breakfast.
Tom Standage, in An Edible History of Humanity, argues that food has consistently been used as a political and economic instrument throughout history, and that the regulation, taxation, and control of food production tells you as much about the societies that produced it as the food itself does. The margarine wars in America are a demonstration of that argument. The legislation was not about food safety. It was about market protection. The dairy industry’s ability to shape food law for decades, and the counter-measures that margarine manufacturers invented in response, produced a regulatory history that had almost nothing to do with what the product tasted like or what it did to the people eating it.
The Reversal Nobody Fully Absorbed
By the mid-twentieth century, margarine had been repositioned as the healthy choice. The science of dietary fat was shifting. Saturated fat, the kind found in butter and in Mege-Mouriès’s original beef tallow margarine, was being linked to heart disease. Vegetable oils and the products made from them were promoted as the modern, scientifically recommended alternative. Margarine advertisements featured doctors. Cardiologists endorsed switching from butter. The product that had spent decades fighting for legitimacy was now the medically sanctioned option.
The problem, identified gradually through the second half of the twentieth century and confirmed by the 1990s, was that the hydrogenation process that made liquid vegetable oils solid at room temperature produced trans fatty acids as a byproduct. Trans fats, it emerged, were worse for cardiovascular health than the saturated fats they had replaced. The margarine promoted as a heart-healthy alternative to butter was, in its hydrogenated form, more harmful than what it had displaced.
The industry reformulated. Trans fats were reduced, then eliminated, through modified hydrogenation processes and the use of tropical oils with different fatty acid profiles. The modern margarine on the shelf is not the margarine that the health campaigns of the 1960s promoted. It is not the margarine that Jurgens built factories to produce. And it is emphatically not the beef tallow and skimmed milk preparation that a French chemist entered into a competition in 1869 because an emperor needed a cheaper way to feed his sailors. The name has stayed constant for one hundred and fifty years. Almost everything else about it has changed at least once.
Every dish has a past. I am just following it back to the beginning.
Jean Louis
Sources
- Margarine, Wikipedia
- Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, Wikipedia
- Unilever, Wikipedia
- Trans fat, Wikipedia
- Hydrogenation, Wikipedia
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