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How the Invention of Margarine Disrupted Big Butter
A French chemist came up with a butter alternative 150 years ago, and Big Dairy has been at war ever since
Being a vegan would have been a bit difficult 150 years ago. Not only was vegetarianism something scowled at in the same way that some restaurant owners still do today, but veganism wasn’t even a thing. Avoiding animal products in your diet was an impossibility, and nowhere was that better proven than by asking a simple question: what would a vegan put on their bread 150 years ago?
Unless you were in the Mediterranean, where you’re more likely to drag a slice of bread through a small pool of olive oil, the sponge-like crumb sucking up the liquid, you had no choice for a vegan-friendly toast topping. Things have rapidly changed: the invention of a new product, margarine, 150 years ago this week by a French chemist opened up a new world of possibility. Walk the sterile aisles of any supermarket and you’re presented with a bamboozling selection of spreads for sale.
There was a time when all you’d be able to get was butter — the product of churning or whipping fatty cow’s milk and ending up with a hefty pat of unctuous fat that melts into bread and turns anything fried in it a crisp, flavorful golden brown. But things have changed. The choice is baffling, and includes plenty of options, some of which make a big deal of being categorically Not Butter. The rise of alternative spreads has given those wanting to avoid all animal products in their diets a lifeline, and we’ve responded by buying them in bulk.
In the UK, the market for stuff to spread on toast was worth $1.75 trillion, according to retail analysts Kantar Worldpanel. More than 820 million pounds of spreads were siphoned into supermarket carts in the last year — a quarter of which was spreadable butter, where pure fat is mixed with oils to thin out the texture so it can give way more readily under the pressure of a knife. Combined, dairy spreads of all types account for seven in every 10 pounds of product sold in UK supermarkets, and nearly 10 times as much margarine as is consumed by British eaters. But nearly 100 million pounds of non-dairy spreads of all stripes were bought in the UK.
