It might have been supposed that since the United States possessed the best land in the world for the production of cottonseed, coconuts, peanuts, and corn that it would have led all other countries in the utilization of vegetable oils for food. That this country has not so used its advantage is due to the fact that the new products have not merely had to overcome popular conservatism, ignorance and prejudice—hard things to fight in any case—but have been deliberately checked and hampered by the state and national governments in defense of vested interests. The farmer vote is a power that no politician likes to defy and the dairy business in every state was thoroughly organized. In New York the oleomargarin industry that in 1879 was turning out products valued at more than $5,000,000 a year was completely crushed out by state legislation.[2] The output of the United States, which in 1902 had risen to 126,000,000 pounds, was cut down to 43,000,000 pounds in 1909 by federal legislation. According to the disingenuous custom of American lawmakers the Act of 1902 was passed through Congress as a "revenue measure," although it meant a loss to the Government of more than three million dollars a year over what might be produced by a straight two cents a pound tax. A wholesale dealer in oleomargarin was made to pay a higher license than a wholesale liquor dealer. The federal law put a tax of ten cents a pound on yellow oleomargarin and a quarter of a cent a pound on the uncolored. But people—doubtless from pure prejudice—prefer a yellow spread for their bread, so the economical housewife has to work over her oleomargarin with the annatto which is given to her when she buys a package or, if the law prohibits this, which she is permitted to steal from an open box on the grocer's counter. A plausible pretext for such legislation is afforded by the fact that the butter substitutes are so much like butter that they cannot be easily distinguished from it unless the use of annatto is permitted to butter and prohibited to its competitors. Fradulent sales of substitutes of any kind ought to be prevented, but the recent pure food legislation in America has shown that it is possible to secure truthful labeling without resorting to such drastic measures. In Europe the laws against substitution were very strict, but not devised to restrict the industry. Consequently the margarin output of Germany doubled in the five years preceding the war and the output of England tripled. In Denmark the consumption of margarin rose from 8.8 pounds per capita in 1890 to 32.6 pounds in 1912. Yet the butter business, Denmark's pride, was not injured, and Germany and England imported more butter than ever before. Now that the price of butter in America has gone over the seventy-five cent mark Congress may conclude that it no longer needs to be protected against competition.
The "compound lards" or "lard compounds," consisting usually of cottonseed oil and oleo-stearin, although the latter may now be replaced by hardened oil, met with the same popular prejudice and attempted legislative interference, but succeeded more easily in coming into common use under such names as "Cottosuet," "Kream Krisp," "Kuxit," "Korno," "Cottolene" and "Crisco."
Oleomargarin, now generally abbreviated to margarin, originated, like many other inventions, in military necessity. The French Government in 1869 offered a prize for a butter substitute for the army that should be cheaper and better than butter in that it did not spoil so easily. The prize was won by a French chemist, Mége-Mouries, who found that by chilling beef fat the solid stearin could be separated from an oil (oleo) which was the substantially same as that in milk and hence in butter. Neutral lard acts the same.
This discovery of how to separate the hard and soft fats was followed by improved methods for purifying them and later by the process for converting the soft into the hard fats by hydrogenation. The net result was to put into the hands of the chemist the ability to draw his materials at will from any land and from the vegetable and animal kingdoms and to combine them as he will to make new fat foods for every use; hard for summer, soft for winter; solid for the northerners and liquid for the southerners; white, yellow or any other color, and flavored to suit the taste. The Hindu can eat no fat from the sacred cow; the Mohammedan and the Jew can eat no fat from the abhorred pig; the vegetarian will touch neither; other people will take both. No matter, all can be accommodated.
All the fats and oils, though they consist of scores of different compounds, have practically the same food value when freed from the extraneous matter that gives them their characteristic flavors. They are all practically tasteless and colorless. The various vegetable and animal oils and fats have about the same digestibility, 98 per cent.,[3] and are all ordinarily completely utilized in the body, supplying it with two and a quarter times as much energy as any other food.
It does not follow, however, that there is no difference in the products. The margarin men accuse butter of harboring tuberculosis germs from which their product, because it has been heated or is made from vegetable fats, is free. The butter men retort that margarin is lacking in vitamines, those mysterious substances which in minute amounts are necessary for life and especially for growth. Both the claim and the objection lose a large part of their force where the margarin, as is customarily the case, is mixed with butter or churned up with milk to give it the familiar flavor. But the difficulty can be easily overcome. The milk used for either butter or margarin should be free or freed from disease germs. If margarin is altogether substituted for butter, the necessary vitamines may be sufficiently provided by milk, eggs and greens.
Owing to these new processes all the fatty substances of all lands have been brought into competition with each other. In such a contest the vegetable is likely to beat the animal and the southern to win over the northern zones. In Europe before the war the proportion of the various ingredients used to make butter substitutes was as follows:
| AVERAGE COMPOSITION OF EUROPEAN MARGARIN | |
| Per Cent. | |
| Animal hard fats | 25 |
| Vegetable hard fats | 35 |
| Copra | 29 |
| Palm-kernel | 6 |
| Vegetable soft fats | 26 |
| Cottonseed | 13 |
| Peanut | 6 |
| Sesame | 6 |
| Soya-bean | 1 |
| Water, milk, salt | 14 |
| ___ | |
| 100 |
This is not the composition of any particular brand but the average of them all. The use of a certain amount of the oil of the sesame seed is required by the laws of Germany and Denmark because it can be easily detected by a chemical color test and so serves to prevent the margarin containing it from being sold as butter. "Open sesame!" is the password to these markets. Remembering that margarin originally was made up entirely of animal fats, soft and hard, we can see from the above figures how rapidly they are being displaced by the vegetable fats. The cottonseed and peanut oils have replaced the original oleo oil and the tropical oils from the coconut (copra) and African palm are crowding out the animal hard fats. Since now we can harden at will any of the vegetable oils it is possible to get along altogether without animal fats. Such vegetable margarins were originally prepared for sale in India, but proved unexpectedly popular in Europe, and are now being introduced into America. They are sold under various trade names suggesting their origin, such as "palmira," "palmona," "milkonut," "cocose," "coconut oleomargarin" and "nucoa nut margarin." The last named is stated to be made of coconut oil (for the hard fat) and peanut oil (for the soft fat), churned up with a culture of pasteurized milk (to impart the butter flavor). The law requires such a product to be branded "oleomargarine" although it is not. Such cases of compulsory mislabeling are not rare. You remember the "Pigs is Pigs" story.
Peanut butter has won its way into the American menu without any camouflage whatever, and as a salad oil it is almost equally frank about its lowly origin. This nut, which grows on a vine instead of a tree, and is dug from the ground like potatoes instead of being picked with a pole, goes by various names according to locality, peanuts, ground-nuts, monkey-nuts, arachides and goobers. As it takes the place of cotton oil in some of its products so it takes its place in the fields and oilmills of Texas left vacant by the bollweevil. The once despised peanut added some $56,000,000 to the wealth of the South in 1916. The peanut is rich in the richest of foods, some 50 per cent. of oil and 30 per cent. of protein. The latter can be worked up into meat substitutes that will make the vegetarian cease to envy his omnivorous neighbor. Thanks largely to the chemist who has opened these new fields of usefulness, the peanut-raiser got $1.25 a bushel in 1917 instead of the 30 cents that he got four years before.