Few everyday pantry staples have provoked the level of geopolitical desperation, cutthroat industrial espionage, state-sponsored economic warfare, and overall mythmaking that defined the invention of margarine. Long before it became a beige supermarket tub associated with mid-century heart-health fads, yellow food-coloring, and absurd internet rumors, margarine was an imperial military technology. In the late 1860s, France was facing the dual crisis of a soaring urban working-class population that couldn’t afford real butter, and Emperor Napoleon III preparing his armed forces for an inevitable clash against Prussia. An army could not march on rancid, and quite scarce, animal fats, and French naval fleets needed a shelf-stable lipid that would not spoil on long sea voyages. In response, Napoleon III issued an imperial challenge, offering a lucrative government prize to any chemist who could engineer a cheap, durable, and palatable butter substitute. The man who solved the puzzle was Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, a visionary French chemist whose background in dairy research and digestive enzymes led him to a revolutionary breakthrough. By fractionating rendered beef tallow with artificial gastric juices and churning it with milk., he was able to produce just what the emperor was asking for. What Mège-Mouriès actually created in 1869 oleomargarine and it had nothing to do with feeding turkeys or any other animals, contrary to popular myth.

This a soft, pale-yellow fat emulsion ultimately sparked the infamous “Butter Wars.” It terrified established dairy cartels, prompted American states to pass laws requiring it to be dyed a revolting pink, and eventually laid the foundation for modern multinational food conglomerates like Unilever. Starting with 19th-century French laboratories and moving through to the bizarre legislative battles designed to kill it, here is the real history of how margarine was actually invented, and the truth behind the persistent myths that still follow it today.

Was Margarine Invented to Fatten Turkeys? The Truth Behind the Viral Myth

Although it is mainly forgotten, those who spent any time on the internet in the early 2000s, encountered a encountered a highly viral chain email titled something along the lines of “Butter vs. Margarine: The Shocking Truth.”

Formatted as a list of bullet points presented by an anonymous, authoritative-sounding “researcher,” the email warned that margarine was lethal synthetic sludge. Chief among its claims was a bizarre piece of origin lore, that margarine was supposedly engineered by industrial chemists as a cheap feed to rapidly fatten domestic turkeys. According to the legend, the experiment was a catastrophe! The feed killed the birds, leaving the panicked manufacturers with warehouses full of a useless product. Rather than taking a loss, the story goes, they simply added artificial yellow dye, slapped a new label on it, and marketed it to humans to replace butter.

The story was tailor-made for forward-button virality. It confirmed people’s worst suspicions about modern food processing and felt like an exposed corporate cover-up. Over the past two decades, the original chain email mutated into social media graphics, forum threads, and short-form videos, stripping away the old email formatting and disconnecting the individual myths from the original source, until millions of people simply accepted the turkey story as a piece of weird historical trivia. I’ve covered the other myths in other article on the site. This article fully covers the true invention of margarine and dispenses with the turkey feeding myth.

So, just to be clear, margarine was never formulated for livestock, was never tested on poultry, and was never the result of a botched animal feed experiment. As we’ve seen, it was commissioned by an emperor, designed specifically for human consumption, and developed in a dairy laboratory to solve a real human food crisis.

Equally fabricated is the email’s dramatic climax regarding its appearance: the claim that the discarded poultry feed was “a white substance with no food appeal, so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people.”

Chemistry Check: Explore the truth behind the margarine and plastic molecular myth.

How Was Margarine Invented?

Prior to the challenge, Mège-Mouriès had already been investigating this area by studying cows at the imperial farms. He had observed that underfed cows lost weight, but they still produced milk, only at a lesser yield. Yet, this milk still contained fat.

He deduced that the fat in the milk must come from the actual body fat reserves of the cows, the tallow rather than being derived directly from food. However, beef tallow does not have the same melting properties as milkfat since tallow contains fat fractions that melt at a much higher temperature.

So, he figured that the fat must somehow be fractionated through some process before being transported to the mammary glands and dispersed as an emulsion in the milk. The “harder” fractions, those with the higher melting points, he reasoned, must be used by the cow for energy.

Mège thought that the enzymatic action of pepsin had something to do with this fractionation process, so he figured that maybe he could imitate the process. He rendered fresh tallow at body heat (45° C), using artificial gastric juices to separate tissue from fat. Then he crystallized the fat at a lower ambient temperature and extracted it under pressure to obtain a soft semi-fluid fraction, called oleomargarine, and a hard white fat called oleostearine.

Was Original Margarine Actually White? Debunking the Dye and Color Myths

The internet compilation claims that this first margarine was white. But, interestingly, this oleomargarine produced by Mège had a pale yellow color, like most butter; and it also had a pleasant taste which was similar to butter. 

What is funny about this is that the margarine fact compilation, right after the first part about it being invented for turkeys, states the following:

It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter.

The first margarine was NOT a pure white substance, and it DID have food appeal. So as far as the first margarine is concerned, the claim that it was unlike food is a myth. And not all butter is deep yellow, by the way, it depends on when in the season it is produced. Some butter with a deeper yellow color has had annatto coloring added, a carotenoid, to keep the color consistent.

People think that yellow means quality in butter, which it doesn’t, although the color, when not artificial, does signify a bit richer flavor. Some butter is a very pale color while some is more yellow. Therefore, before I continue with the margarine narrative, let me give you a better lowdown on the color of butter, and some overview of the added color in margarine controversy.

Butter Can Be Pale-Yellow to Deep Yellow

Milkfat commonly has a pale yellow color and this is the color that most U.S consumers associate with quality. However, there is a range of colors possible for butter, and the color, as long as it is within this range, does not affect the quality scoring, as far as the USDA is concerned. In other words, a more yellow butter will not be Grade A, just because it is more yellow. What they look for instead are color defects. You don’t want butter with colored specks, or streaks, or any kind of uneven color.

You also don’t want butter that is very pale and bleached-looking. But beyond all that, butter can come in a range of pale yellows. The color of the butter is controlled by the availability of feed. The carotenoids in the green feeds produce the yellow color. ¹Clark, Stephanie, and F. W. Bodyfelt. The Sensory Evaluation of Dairy Products. New York, NY: Springer, 2009. Used to be, in the spring and summer, when cows were grazing on green forage, the butter produced from their milk had a more yellow color. Over the winter, when they were being fed dried grains, the butter was more pale.

The nice yellow butter or spring butter had a bit more flavor than the winter butter so a more yellow butter became associated with a better butter. People still expect this today, so it is not unheard of to add a bit of color to make a commercial butter product consistent all year long. This is also because people expect absolute consistency in food products, even in products that would normally come in a range of colors when left unadulterated.

Adding Color to Margarine

Now, this practice of adding some color to butter to make any butter look like spring butter was being done way back when margarine was still fairly new. The subsequent margarines produced from vegetable oils, as opposed to the tallow that Mège initially used, did not have a yellow color, this is true. The makers added color so that their product looked more like butter.

The butter industry got very upset over this and called it fraud. They ignored the fact that they also added color to their product without revealing it to the consumer. However, their argument was that butter cannot really be expected to be uniform in color, but in a time of packaged goods, consumers expect uniformity, as mentioned above.

Thus, the edition of yellow color. If butter were left white when it was white, sometimes there would be yellow butter, and other times there would be pale or whitish butter, and uniformity would be threatened. Plus, they argued, butter would have no distinction from margarine.

At this time, the dairy industry had only just come into its own, so to speak. Preserving dairy products so that they could be produced and distributed on a large scale had been very difficult in the past. Now that the dairy industry was an actual industry, along came margarine to threaten it, with what it saw as a fraudulent and illegitimate product.

Margarine Taxes and Pink Laws: Why Big Dairy Tried to Ban Margarine

Through lobbying, eventually, a bill was passed in 1886 that didn’t prohibit margarine, but levied taxes making it very difficult for it to be sold:

• Manufacturers must pay a $600 licensing fee
• Wholesalers must pay $480 a year, unless they sold only uncolored margarine, in which case they paid $200
• Grocers had to pay license fees of $48 and $6 dollars, colored or uncolored, respectively
• Colored margarine taxed at 10 cents per pound
• Uncolored margarine taxed at 4 cents per pound

The taxes on colored and uncolored margarine increased over the years

The public has the perception that margarine industry has enjoyed a free and unmolested rise. This obviously is not true. In fact, even before this national bill was passed, many states had placed various restrictions or bans on margarine, some of which remained in place almost to the 1950’s.

• In Pennsylvania, margarine labels had to be done in Gothic type
• Utah required licensing and fees from retailers of margarine
• In West Virginia, Virginia, Vermont, and New Hampshire and other states, margarine must be colored pink 

In 1941, a Standard of Identity was defined for margarine, and the tax laws were repealed in 1950. After that, margarine sales increased.

Is Margarine Newer Than Butter? The History of Commercial Spreads

Another claim made by the compilation specifically reads:

Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years.

Margarine has been around over 140 years. Regardless, how long a food has been around has nothing to do with how good or bad it is—not that I am saying that you should be eating margarine off a spoon. I would recommend butter. Still not off a spoon.

The First Commercial Margarine Products

This section was not originally part of this article. I added it to clear up some confusion regarding “white” margarine products readers may remember from the 1940s. As described above, the first margarine was made from beef tallow. This gave it a pale yellow color, as well as some taste. The first commercial margarines were indeed produced from the tallow fats of beef, and perhaps other animal fats. These margarines were sold for over 30 years before the process of hydrogenation was invented and patented in 1902.

These tallow margarines were sold commercially as early as 1871 in countries such as Denmark, Netherlands, France, and Austria-Hungary. In the United States, the first commercial margarine was sold as early as 1874. In Germany, 1875, and in the U.K., 1889.

But, the biggest change in margarine was the use of vegetable oils, which were made into margarine by a process called hydrogenation, to make the fats saturated, like animal fats, by artificial means. As you’ve probably guessed, margarine wasn’t always called margarine, at least not everywhere. It was sometimes called just oleo, sometimes oleomargarine, sometimes margarine, and in Britain, Butterine.

Health Claims In Margarine Message

There are many health claims in the original message. I have ignored most of these in this article. This is because, if you read the message you can see that the entire purpose of the message was not to repeat claims of how margarine affects your health, but to drive home the purported difference between margarine and butter as discussed above. That being said, although there is no credible evidence to back up some of the health claims, there is a kernel of truth to some of them.

According to the evidence we have at present, trans fats should generally be avoided. In 2006 the FDA began requiring food manufacturers to list the amount of trans fats in their products. Most “margarine” products, marketed as butter substitutes, no longer contain any hydrogenated fats, and any comparison between these modern products and the original margarine products is not intended in this article. Margarine is still available, however.

Why Am I Not Addressing “Modern” Margarines?

I have received several related comments about the fact that this article has nothing to do with modern butter substitutes, such as “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter” or “Country Crock” while others have informed me in various ways of how terrible margarine is, etc. Most readers expect such a “butter versus margarine” article to tell them what they already believe, that butter is better and more healthy than margarine. This was not my purpose.

I have copied and pasted, with some minor alterations, my response to one such comment, as a final explanation:

This is more of a historical overview in response to the netlore, email chain, etc. that still circulates to this day, than any attempt to compare butter to the types of products that are now sitting on shelves.

In fact, although they are still colloquially known as margarine, they are not margarine at all and are not legally allowed to be called margarine. So, I am indeed comparing butter to margarine and not comparing butter to butter-substitute spreads.

While older margarine products relied on the use of hydrogenated fats, some may be concerned that these products replace the trans fat with more saturated fat, such as from palm oil, palm kernel oil, and coconut oil.

It is worth mentioning that, although there has recently begun a health-craze concerning coconut oil as a supplement, these are not available to consumers as cooking oils at the grocery-store level but are used in large-scale food production. (*Update: Since this section was written, coconut oil has become more widely available to consumers for use in home cooking or for use on the skin, etc.)

However, it is not true that this article only concerns margarine made over 100 years ago, as one reader commented. The type of margarine still available in the 1980s and into the 1990s would still be subject to these claims, and in fact, it is these more modern margarines made with vegetable oils rather than animal fats that the original netlore concerns.

I’ve illustrated as much in my corrections of the incorrect margarine history given in the original message.

The Legacy of the “Butter Wars”

The history of margarine is a wild ride from Napoleon III’s battlefield rations to the legislative “Color Wars” of the 20th century. While the viral myths of the early 2000s painted a picture of a “near-plastic” turkey-killer, the truth is far more grounded in food science and economic competition.

Whether you choose butter or margarine for your table today, understanding the difference between a scary internet legend and actual chemistry is key. If you want to dive even deeper into the specific science and legal battles we’ve touched on, check out our full investigations below:

More Margarine Myths

The Spoilage Test: See why flies actually avoid certain fats in my full scientific exploration of the margarine garage test.
Colorful History: Learn more about the bizarre era of pink margarine laws.