"You can’t tell it from butter; by George, even an expert can’t!... We’re going to have that entire trade... You are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can’t find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with... we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has got to take it...There’s more money in oleomargarine than- why, you can’t imagine the business we do." "

(Mark Twain, Life On the Mississippi 1883)

The above quotation from pen of the famous author Mark Twain in 1883 is almost prophetic as it reflects the situation that exists today. It is the gleeful conversation that takes place between two businessmen on a riverboat who are talking about a new product called oleomargarine that had come on the market. They were gleeful because the product was perceived had incredible business potential - in other words lots of money.

The invention of oleomargarine came about as a result of a prize that Emperor Louis Napoleon III of France offered in 1869 to anyone who could make a satisfactory substitute for butter that would be suitable for use by the armed forces and the lower classes. Butter was too expensive and did not last very long. Galvanised by the offer French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriésinvented a substance he called oleomargarine, the name of which became shortened to the trade name "margarine". Oleomargarine was made by taking clarified beef fat, extracting the liquid portion under pressure, and then allowing it to solidify. When combined with butyrin and water, it made a cheap and more-or-less palatable butter substitute.

Mège-Mouriés patented his oleomargarine in 1869 and manufacturing began in earnest. He expanded his initial manufacturing operation from France but had little commercial success. In 1871, he sold the patent to the Dutch company Jurgens and in 1873 he obtained a a U.S. patent. The ground was now set for a revolution in food that would have dire consequences in the future.

In 1906, vegetable oils were first substituted for the tallow fat/skimmed milk combination, to lower the price even more and improve the product. Up till this time, margarine was considered a poor substitute for butter; good grocers would not even sell it, and some sellers were arrested for handling it. Its only lure lay in its cheapness. However, the introduction of vegetable oils into the margarine mix turned the tide abroad but it was not until the First World War that it gained wide acceptance. This was because butter was rationed in England and the only substitute was margarine, and so this resulted in many people having to eat margarine or nothing. By the war's end margarine had become so common place that it was here to stay.

The depression of the 1930s, followed by the rationing of World War II, led to a reduction in supply of animal fat; and, by 1945, it almost completely disappeared from the market. In the U.S., problems with supply, coupled with changes in legislation, had caused the manufacturers to change over almost completely to vegetable fats by 1950. In Europe during the 1930's the edible oil industry was riding on the crest of an ever growing wave for the demand for their margarine products.Lever Brothers Ltd a well established British soap manufacture with its own oil palm plantations in the Congo and the Solomon Islands waas one company that was not going to be left behind. They could see that there was" big money to be had" with margarine and an opportunity arose that Lever Brothers grabbed

In 1927 Jurgens (who had the patent for oleomargarine) and Van den Bergh, who have already teamed up with two European businesses, Centra and Schicht, joined forces to create Margarine Unie - the Margarine Union. The union quickly gained new members, creating a large group of European businesses involved in the production of almost all goods created from oils and fats. Two years later Lever Brothers and Margarine Unie signed an agreement and merged to create Unilever.

The new company Unilever started to promote a brand of margarine called "Stork". In 1938 Vitamins A & D are added to margarine, to levels equivalent to those found in butter followed by advertising campaigns to dispel thoughts that margarine was unhealthy. A year latger The Stork Cookery Service was launched in 1939 to help housewives discover cooking with margarine when food rationing began. As margarine sales continued to grow, something else grew too. Heart disease? Heart disease was rare in 1910 but forty year later in 1950, coronary heart disease (CHD) had become the leading source of mortality in the United States, causing more than 30 per cent of all deaths in that country. In some countries of Europe a similar story was told but in many other European countries in the opposite was true. What was going on?

Some scientists began to suspect that margarine had something to do with the problem. They could see that butter consumption was declining, while the use of vegetable oils, especially oils that had been hardened to resemble butter by a process called 'hydrogenation', as found in margarines like Stork was increasing dramatically. The statistics pointed to one obvious conclusion, that one should return to eating the traditional foods - including meat, eggs, butter and cheese - that had nourished our ancestors for centuries and where heart disease was virtually unknown.

Rumours that some scientists were blaming magarine for the heart disease pandemic soon fed through to the editible oil companies, and things looked pretty dire for them for a while. Their business enterprises based upon margarine seemed now in jeapody. They needed a champion for their cause and the god of greed heard their prayers.

A Champion came forth and margarine multiplied - and so did heart disease

Myocardial infarction (MI) - a massive blood clot leading to obstruction of a coronary artery and consequent death to the heart muscle. MI was almost non-existent in 1910 and caused no more than 3,000 deaths per year in 1930. By 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths per year in the US. What lifestyle changes had caused this increase?

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