It’s Not Butter! Oleomargarine, Consumption, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the 20th Century

In 1873, French food chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès secured a U.S. patent for his invention oleomargarine. Responding to a Napoleonic order to devise an alternative for fresh butter because urban, working class consumers could no longer afford it, Mège's discovery consisted of heating beef fat, salt, and stomach enzymes together. Edible, inexpensive, and efficient in its use of cattle by-products, the popular invention soon spread.

Unsurprisingly, the primary opposition to butter substitutes in the United States came from the dairy industry. Dairy producers, suffering from declining farm prices writ large, saw oleomargarine and its entrepreneurial producers as threats to driving "real" butter off the market at scales unmatched by alternatives like benne (sesame), peanut, and poppy oil. The movement ostensibly in defense of butter took on a broader social critique of the transition to an industrial society. Meanwhile, midwestern farmers and labor leaders supported the production of margarine, the former because of its eventual close connection to Chicago's meatpacking industry and the latter because it supplied an affordable and accessible source of nutrients to workers in the U.S.. Because industrial work demanded "a diet with minimum ballast and maximum energy value," widespread access to fats for workers likewise gained favor among industrialists. Consumers approached oleomargarine open mindedly, and the majority purchased the new product out of necessity as much as preference.

How did access to affordable foodstuffs like oleomargarine forge odd continuities between consumer, labor, and capital interests? In what ways did this alliance intersect with government support of small but vocal dairy interests? What can comparisons to politicking around and consumption of margarine abroad reveal about the U.S. context? This paper explores national and international intersections of labor politics, agrarian movements, and consumer demands with regards to butter and its substitutes in the final decades of the nineteenth century.