The Butter Wars: Why Was Margarine Dyed Pink?
A while back, towards the end of the nineteenth century, margarine became a serious rival to butter. It was cheaper, increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real thing, and consumers were buying it. America’s tyrannic dairy industry was not pleased.
This may be a story about margarine, but it is really a story about competition, power and the lengths big players in the food industry will go to protect their place at the table. In this conflict, the battleground was colour.
Margarine had first appeared in France in the late 1860s, developed by the chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès following a challenge from Napoleon III to create an inexpensive alternative to butter. The idea was born largely from practicality. Butter was relatively expensive and perishable, while a cheaper substitute had obvious appeal, particularly for feeding a growing urban population and the military.
The idea travelled, and by the late nineteenth century margarine had become an increasingly familiar presence in the United States. Its affordability was precisely what made it attractive to consumers, and what made it threatening to dairy farmers and butter producers. There was also the matter of appearance. Early margarine was naturally much paler than the rich yellow butter consumers recognised, but manufacturers could colour it, giving their product the same familiar golden hue as the real thing.
To the dairy industry, this was more than cosmetic. If margarine could look like butter, sit beside butter and be sold for less, what exactly was protecting butter? Dairy interests argued that consumers could be deceived into buying an imitation believing it to be the genuine article, and legislators began introducing restrictions on how margarine could be manufactured, marketed and sold. The federal Oleomargarine Act of 1886 imposed taxes and licensing requirements on the new product, while individual states pursued measures of their own.
Some states prohibited margarine manufacturers from colouring their product yellow. If butter was yellow, the reasoning went, margarine should not be allowed to dress itself in butter’s clothes. New Hampshire, Vermont and South Dakota, however, went further: they introduced laws requiring margarine to be coloured pink.
They knew their consumers. Butter was supposed to be yellow. Turn its cheaper rival pink and something perfectly edible suddenly looked artificial, unfamiliar and distinctly unappetising. Nothing fundamental about the food needed to change; only the way people perceived it.
In New Hampshire, selling margarine that wasn’t pink could land you a hefty fine. The fight eventually reached the US Supreme Court after a representative of Swift & Co. named Collins was fined $100 for selling a ten-pound package of yellow margarine. In 1898, the Court struck down the law, recognising the requirement for what it effectively was: a rather cunning way of making margarine almost impossible to sell.
In considering the case, the Supreme Court followed that logic to its natural conclusion: if a state could insist upon pink margarine, why not red, blue or black? At what point did a regulation designed to distinguish one product from another become a means of making that product commercially undesirable?
The silliness at the heart of the butter feud was that butter wasn’t necessarily the perfect golden yellow everyone was fighting so fiercely to protect. Its natural colour varies according to what cows eat and the time of year, with fresh pasture producing different levels of yellow pigment in the milk fat. Butter producers themselves had long used colouring to achieve the rich, consistent glow consumers had come to expect.
Both sides understood something rather important: people don’t simply taste food, they read it. Long before something reaches our mouths, its appearance has already told us what to expect. Colour can suggest ripeness, freshness, richness, sweetness, artificiality or even danger. We carry around a remarkably detailed visual vocabulary of food without ever consciously learning it.
Butter should be yellow, milk should be white, mint should be green and strawberries should be red. Change those signals and our experience of the food can change with them. So the battle over margarine wasn’t simply about ingredients or price. It was about the commercial value of an association that already existed in the minds of consumers.
But who got to hold the patent on yellow? The dairy industry had long benefited from a colour that signalled familiarity, quality and the real thing. Margarine manufacturers understood that borrowing the colour allowed them to borrow those associations too, and the established industry had little intention of allowing a cheaper newcomer to do so.
The battle did not end with the Supreme Court decision. Margarine continued to face taxes, colouring restrictions and fierce political opposition in the decades that followed. In parts of North America, manufacturers were prevented from selling margarine already coloured yellow, producing one of the stranger domestic rituals in modern food history: pale or white margarine could be sold with yellow colouring for consumers to mix into it themselves at home. The manufacturer might not be allowed to make margarine look like butter, but the person eating it could.
Consumers weren’t changing what margarine was made from or what purpose it served. They were simply changing its appearance until it looked the way they believed a butter-like spread ought to look. They were, in effect, making margarine look right.
That is why the story of pink margarine is more than an amusing footnote in food history. The Butter Wars weren’t really about margarine pretending to be butter. They were about an established industry protecting something far less tangible than a recipe or an ingredient: the associations consumers had already attached to a colour. Butter had become yellow culturally as much as physically, and once that association acquired commercial value, colour itself became territory worth defending.