It's the 1870s. Travel is getting faster, but it's still not instantaneous. Imagine you're on a long boat trip, and you want to have a little snack, but you find your butter has gone rancid. You can't exactly go around to the corner store and pick up a fresh batch. What do you do?
If you're the French navy, the answer was apparently to create artificial butter for your sailors, and incidentally spark a century-long debate on the healthiness and purity of food. Articles that repeated this breakthrough word for word started circulating in Virginia newspapers in the early 1870s, generally reading, as this version in Tri-Weekly News, Volume 7, Number 141, 6 December 1872:
Artificial Butter.— At the request of the [victual] department of the French navy for some wholesome substitute for butter that would keep well, Mege Mouriez [Mège-Mouriès], after a long course of experiments, has succeeded in producing an excellent substitute for genuine butter, that does not become rancid with time, and is otherwise highly recommended.
As the Wikipedia article notes, the exact chemical reaction was not understood with complete accuracy at the time, but the resultant product was a neutral fat, that when mixed with milk, created a substance similar to butter. This substance was dubbed oleomargarine. The article noted that if the margarine was to be used for something like a sea-voyage where preservation was the utmost priority, the margarine "is melted by a gentle heat in order to eliminate all the water" and extend its shelf-life.
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| The Churning Room, from Scientific American, April 24, 1880 |
While the process was patented in France in the 1860s, it seems to have escaped into the wild in 1871. The invention crossed the Atlantic, and stories about this mysterious artificial butter started circulating in the American press for the next year. The invention seems mainly to have been a point of curiosity, as this article in the Virginia Free Press, 7 October 1876 relates:
During the siege of Paris [in 1871], the butter gave out in the great city. A skillful chemist invented a substitute made by a chemical process from the fat of animals, and this substitute, called Oleomargarine, was introduced into the Paris markets. It was not as nice as the genuine article, but the genuine article was not to be had on account of the siege, and many persons, thinking Oleomargarine better than no butter at all, used it extensively, and the manufacturers made money by it. When the siege was raised, however, the people of Paris returned to their Normandy grass butter.
If these kinds of articles were penned in America with an eye toward delegitimizing margarine, it may have partially succeeded. This attitude was likely helped by a concerted effort from dairy farmers to block new competition and paint it as impure or unhealthy. New York and Maryland banned the sale of oleomargarine in 1877, and many other states passed various legislation aimed at regulating the substance in the coming decades. The Federal Oleomargarine Act of 1886 further allowed for examination of butter to ensure it had not been adulterated with margarine.
Even when faced with these additional regulations and taxes, margarine's affordability made it appealing. Advances in manufacturing increased oleomargarine's flavor and texture, and a growing body of scientific evidence supported its safety. Federal rulings eased some restrictions, and margarine became a common grocery store staple. Individual states held onto restrictions long after the Federal regulation has eased, with Wisconsin being the last to lift its ban on colored oleomargarine in 1967.
The history of margarine has been covered before by many other researchers; you may be interested in Victorian America's Oleomargarine in particular if you like the deep dive into primary resources. For a look at the last holdout, you may enjoy When Margarine Was Contraband at JSTOR Daily.
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