Today in 1869, inventor Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès received the French patent for a butter substitute used around the world today: margarine.
In the mid-19th Century, French monarch Napoleon III offered a prize to anyone who could create a butter substitute.
There was a butter shortage at the time; even it had been available, some citizens couldn’t afford to buy it.
Plus, the French navy needed a butter-like product that wouldn’t go bad while at sea.
Mège-Mouriès was a chemist who had worked for over a decade working on ways to improve foods.
In fact, he’d won the Legion of Honour from Napoleon III for creating a way to make bread that yielded 14 percent more, without any additional ingredients.
His prize winning creation was called oleomargarine and instead of dairy, it was made mostly from beef fat.
He never made much money off the stuff himself, but the companies that started making and selling margarine in the 1870s sure did… to the irritation of dairy farmers and butter producers.
Critics said the rise of margarine would mean the fall of the family dairy farm; some even claimed the margarine factories were secretly adding stuff to their recipe, like poison, paint, even the remains of stray cats (!)
The US government passed a butter-protective margarine tax in 1886; some states banned the stuff altogether, and others it could be sold only if it wasn’t the same color as butter.
There was a lot of pink margarine back then.
But the industry outlasted all of that opposition and more.
Margarine isn’t consumed as much as butter today, but it’s sold in a lot of forms and under lots of names.
Fortunately none of them are I Can’t Believe It’s Not Spreadable Vegetable Oil Mixed With Cats And Paint.
If you like candid videos of undersea life, check out the new one from Odysseas Froilan.
He was on a cruise in the Bahamas and dropped his GoPro overboard.
The seven minute video that resulted is a kind of marine reality show, complete with a cameo by a shark.
We’re gonna need a longer video!
This week in science history: Margarine inventor’s fame spreads (Cosmos via Archive.org)
The Butter Wars: When Margarine Was Pink (National Geographic)
Man Drops GoPro Overboard on Cruise Ship, Captures Incredible Undersea Footage (My Modern Met)