The butter battle.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Artifact - The black market history of margarine in the What's Cooking, Uncle Sam exhibit - Brief article

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WHEN SOMEONE predicts that "our soils will become barren" and "the dairy industry will be destroyed," you might think a wrathful god is unleashing a cattle plague. But in 1886, the year those threats were registered in the Congressional Record, the source of deadly danger was no deity. It was margarine.

The cheap alternative to butter was taking France by storm. Fearing froggy competition, the American dairy lobby warned that the margarine menace would rob the red-blooded American public of "life promoting vitamins ... without which human infants cannot continue to live." Congress was thus persuaded to pass the Margarine Act of 1886. Butter alternatives became more expensive, thanks to high taxes and limited access to licenses for legal production, which remained in place...