The MARCH of MARGARINE

Cue (NZERS), Issue 27, 15 July 1945, Page 18

The MARCH of MARGARINE

-p UT for an occasional war few New 1 " Zealanders would have even a nodding acquaintance with margarine as a table preparation. Rare is the New Zealand housewife who would court matrimonial strife to the extent of insisting that the breakfast toast and ‘marmalade should be separated by a smearing of margarine. Instead, if she .uses margarine at all, she keeps it discreetly in the larder as a cooking requisite.

Admittedly New Zealanders are fastidious in their tastes, as well they can afford to be in a country so richly -endowed with the good things. of life. In countries less fortunately situated, with insufficient butter to-go around, the answer is margarine.

Margarine will always have its critics—ask anyone in the armybut the fact remains that it does fill in a satisfactory way the gap between having butter on our bread and having just bread. More, per medium of that symbol of the company quartermaster, the can-opener, margarine fits more smoothly into the overall picture of mobile warfare as it is known today than would, say, a Jersey herd, a milking plant and a separating machine.

By contrast with many other ersatz” products, margarine does not owe its existence to the exigencies of war. Frenchmen introduced it to the world nearly eighty years ago with a rather crude substance consisting

chiefly of animal fat and known as oleomargarine. The eminent French' chemist, Mege-Mouries, having surmised that the formation of the butterfat contained in milk was due to the absorption of fat contained in the animal tissues, experimented on the splitting up of animal fat. The result was that a process was eventually adopted for heating finely minced beef suet with water, carbonate of potash ami fresh Cheep’s stomach cut up into small fragments. The influence of the pepsine of the sheep’s stomach with the heat separated the fat from the cellular tissue. The chemist removed the fatty matter .and submitted it when cool to powerful hydraulic pressure, extracting the oleomargarine which he used for making artificial butter. When impregnated with milk odour and colouring the substance was found to resemble butter to a remarkable degree.

Methods of production have changed or improved down the years and in the meantime vegetable fats and whale oil have been introduced as basic ingredients to- eke out the scarcer or dearer beef fat. Palm-kernel oil, palm-oil and. oil from dried coconuts are the vegetable oils most used. As yet the'coinposition of butterfats cannot be imitated, for the reason that whereas animals manufacture butyric acid and put it into milk fats, plant fats are innocent of butyric acids.

Still another disadvantage is that whereas animal fats contain vitamins

A and D vegetable fats, with the exception of palm-oil, do not. So in the making of • margarine from vegetable fats these vitamins have to be introduced in the process of manufacture.

: Strangely enough margarine is not the competitor to butter that many may think ; rather is it an offshoot of the dairy industry, just as the manufacture of butter always is, in a margarine factory, a by-product of margarine.

Even Denmark with its worldfamous herds quickly took up the manufacture of margarine and in the war of 1914-18 the Danes sold their butter' to Germany and for their own use made margarine- from vegetable oils imported from the tropics.

Denmark, too, bad .pioneered, the research on the milk-souring microbes of the butter, factory whose aid was needed to give margarine .the flavour of . butter. In . the manufacture of margarine, skimmed milk, ' flavoured by theise microbes, is incorporated to the right amount in the melted fats employed for the purpose, and the mixture is then rapidly frozen. English manufacturers discovered that the microbes discovered in butter produced in Devonshire and Cornwall

gave margarine an aroma and flavour closely resembling those of English butter.

That is margarine, the butter substitute, named, by the way, from the Latin ’’margarita”, meaning pearl. The word margarine was adopted because of the pearly lustre of the fat.

What is the future, of margarine? Will it retain its. strong position in the the post-war world? It is most unlikely. There is little doubt that the product has attained an important position in the world of war, but at best it is merely a substitute food and seldom does such a product offer strong competition to the genuine article. New Zealand dairy farmers, whose butter finds such a ready market in Britain, should have little fear of margarine offering serious opposition to their high quality produce. Soldiers and householders who have had to be content with margarine in the long weary years of war will welcome a return to butter, and it is unlikely that anything but the genuine product of the dairy farm will be used for the slice of bread or the morning toast. Too long have they had to take margarine ’’for butter or for worse”.