STORY OF MARGARINE

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21081, 6 April 1940, Page 15 (Supplement)

STORY OF MARGARINE

HOW IT ORIGINATED MENACE TO BUTTER (By Professor V. H. Mottram, In the Manchester Guardian) The search for “Ersatzmittel”— substitutes for the real thing—did not start, as might be supposed, in the last war. It was not the beleaguered Germans but the frugal French who first produced a substitute for butter, and that as long ago as the late sixties of last century. Its production had not even the stimulus of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, for the first process was patented in 1869, and the first manufacture of the substitute had to wait till well after the close of the disturbances begun by that war. People were, and are, not content to use the drippings from the various joints—beef, mutton, pork, goose, etc.—to spread on their bread. They want something of the colour, consistency and taste of butter which they can pretend is butter and even mistake for butter. Colour and flavour are not grave difficulties, as will be shown later, but composition —that is the despair of the margarine manufacturer. Crude First Attempts The first attempts to make a butter substitute—butterine or oleomargarine, as it was called—were crude and naive. We realise that what was accomplished by the MegeMouries process was a separation from beef fat of the lower meltingpoint fats and the impregnation of them with the odour of milk. These fats had approximately the meltingpoint of butter fat, and so when appropriately coloured with some of the butter colouring materials and when flavoured with milk, might be mistaken for butter. By 1876 over a million pounds of butterine was imported into this country. True to her nature, Great Britain proved extremely resistant. Snobbery, the dairy industry, public opinion were all against the introduction of this butter substitute, and it was not until the eve of the nineties that the first margarine factory was started, in Godley, Cheshire, where its manufacture has been carried on ever since.

Other countries, even agricultural countries like Denmark, were not so slow in taking up the manufacture of margarine. In fact, dairy research greatly influenced the manufacture

of margarine, and consequently margarine might almost be regarded as an offshoot of the dairy industry, much as the manufacture of butter always is, in a margarine works, a by-product of margarine. A highly developed dairy industry thus came to dominate the margarine industry. Vitamins Included Twenty years ago, when the writer was “apprenticed”’ to margarine, the control of the scientific side of the work was in the hands of Danes. The queer paradox worked in this way: Butter is a soft fat in which there is some 16 per cent of water. The fats used in margarine have therefore to have incorporated in them about this same amount. Also they want the flavour of butter. So skimmed milk, flavoured by growing in it the microbes which give butter its taste, is incorporated, to the right amount, in the melted fats which are going to be turned into margarine, and the mixture is rapidly frozen. Sometimes this is done by spraying the mixture on to huge rotating drums through which iced brine is passing, sometimes simpler methods are adopted. The microbes originally used were the milk-souring microbes of the butter factory, upon which extensive research had been made in Denmark. But a search among the microbes found in the admirable butter of Devonshire and Cornwall has discovered aroma-producing microbes which give margarine a flavour much more resembling that of English butter. No longer is beef fat, melted and pressed to yield oleo oil, the sole source of the margarine fats. It is too dear. Vegetable fats and whale oil, partially hardened by catalytic treatment in the presence of hydrogen, have taken its place. Palm-kernel oil, palm oil, oil from dried coconut are the vegetable oils most used. The problem is to give them the consistency and melting-point of the butter fats. The composition of butter fats cannot be imitated —yet. Animals manufacture butyric acid and put it into milk fats. Plant fats are innocent of butyric acid, though they may have (coconut fat) some fairly near relatives of butyric acid. That coping-stone in the manufacture of a butter substitute the organic chemist has not yet laid. Scientific Side There is another thing which margarine lacks unless it is fortified in tne process of manufacture —vitamins A and D. Animal fats have vitamins A and D in them. Vegetable fats (with the exception of palm oil, which has vitamin A or, rather, b-carotene) have not. Consequently the manufacture of margarine from vegetable fats deprived margarine of the vitamins it once had. Now all margarines should by law have vitamins A and D added to them to make them the equivalent of summer butter. After some agitation this has become the law of the land “for the duration.” We must see that this law is made permanent.

Today we have margarines on the market which no one, not even the gourmet and certainly not the dietitian, should be ashamed of eating. They have the texture, the flavour, and the nutritive value of butter, and seventy years’ research has gone to the making of the modern margarine. It is not so much a butter substitute as a new food having the majority of the characteristics of butter.