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 b...
Forgotten history fished from the river of forgetfulness