oleomargarine

I’m taking the lead on today’s blog which, in case you didn’t see the title, deals with a spreading issue. You’ll have to go to Our Little Corner (formerly Andy’s Corner) to find out what Ann is up to. All I can tell you is that she’s offering a limited, one-time-only deal that you won’t want to miss. But you must hurry – it’s first come, first served.

The “spreading” issue I will be writing about takes me back to my childhood. When I was a kid, real butter appeared on our table only for special occasions such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. Oleomargarine, which I suppose you would consider to be a butter surrogate, was our daily spread for toast, pancakes, pressure-cooked mashed potatoes, and waffles. I assumed that all households were like ours in this regard.

I learned the error of that assumption the first time I had dinner with Ann’s parents when we flew out to Colorado to announce our engagement.  I don’t remember what Ann’s mother fixed for our dinner that first evening, but I do recall my surprise at the amount of butter (real butter!) her father slathered on just about everything on his plate.  And I couldn’t help but notice that my future bride wasn’t far behind him in the butter-slathering department. It was it an eye-opening (and life changing) experience for a butter-deprived California boy. I should add that not once during the 56+ years since then has a cube of oleomargarine managed to find its way to our dining table.

So why was Ann’s family so butter-centric?  My first thought was that it probably had something to do with a family tradition dating back to when Ann’s grandmother (“Mom Hill”) would serve her fresh-from-the-oven biscuits dripping with the butter (which she had churned by hand). Appealing as such a scenario may be, the truth probably has less to do with some warm and fuzzy family tradition and more to do with Ann’s grandfather (“Pop Hill”) and bare-knuckled politics.

I’ve long known that Ann’s grandfather was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Colorado’s 2nd congressional district from 1940 to 1958. But it wasn’t until Ann recently shared with me a link to some Congressional records that I learned that Pop Hill was a fierce defender of the dairy industry, and of butter in particular. More specifically, it’s pretty clear that he believed that the unregulated marketing of oleomargarine not only could put family dairies out of business it could jeopardize the American way of life!

This may sound far-fetched, but a quick perusal of the transcripts from the 1949 Oleomargarine Hearings of the House Agricultural Committee bears this out. I should mention that these and many other transcripts are available free on the Google Books web site (an amazing resource!).

I had anticipated that reading the transcripts to be a slog, but it didn’t take long before I was hooked. I was fascinated with the (sometimes nasty) bickering, the posturing, the witticisms, and the occasional elegance – all concerning whether or not margarine was a threat to butter! And Pop Hill was front and center in going after the oleomargarine apologists. No wonder Ann grew up in a butter-laden household.

The butter vs. oleomargarine battles started long before these 1949 hearings. For an entertaining overview of the historical details (including a pro-margarine pitch by Eleanor Roosevelt) click on the below YouTube video from CBS’s 2014 Almanac: A Tax on Margarine.

For my purposes here I’ll focus on one major issue that dominated much of the committee’s time – the color yellow.

Margarine in its natural state is white like lard, so to appeal to the consumer it was dyed yellow. In response to political pressure from the dairy industry, in 1902 Congress imposed a hefty tax on any oleomargarine colored yellow. In true American spirit of creative innovation, the industry quickly figured our how to get around these color restrictions. They began packaging the margarine in a plastic bag with a capsule of yellow dye that would turn the margarine yellow when massaged by the consumer.

As a kid one of my “chores” was massaging the yellow dye into the white oleomargarine. I thought it was kind of a kick although my older sister considered it a bother. She may even have been the author of the letter mentioned by one of Pop Hill’s detractors during the hearings:

At one point in the hearings Anna Lord Strauss, president of the League of Women Voters, appeared at the hearings to voice her opposition to the taxes on colored oleomargarine. Here is some of her exchange with Pop Hill

Pop Hill also was concerned that in restaurants yellow oleomargarine could be passed off to unsuspecting diners as butter:

Although the tax on oleomargarine was discontinued not long after these hearings, Pop Hill eventually helped get a bill passed that required restaurants to clearly distinguish between butter and margarine when offered to customers. He considered that to be one of his notable accomplishments as a Congressman. But in my opinion, Pop Hill’s crowning achievement was that he passed his passion for butter down to his granddaughter. Consider the fact that since 2017 butter has appeared on our BigLittleMeals blog 203 times, the most recent example being Ann’s recipe for Schweine Schnitzel – which she posted in today’s Our Little Corner and has two tablespoons of butter (with no margarine!).