Crisco."

Oleomargarin, now generally abbreviated to margarin, originated, like
many other inventions, in military necessity. The French Government in
1869 offered a prize for a butter substitute for the army that should be
cheaper and better than butter in that it did not spoil so easily. The
prize was won by a French chemist, Mege-Mouries, who found that by
chilling beef fat the solid stearin could be separated from an oil
(oleo) which was the substantially same as that in milk and hence in
butter. Neutral lard acts the same.

This discovery of how to separate the hard and soft fats was followed by
improved methods for purifying them and later by the process for
converting the soft into the hard fats by hydrogenation. The net result
was to put into the hands of the chemist the ability to draw his
materials at will from any land and from the vegetable and animal
kingdoms and to combine them as he will to make new fat foods for every
use; hard for summer, soft for winter; solid for the northerners and
liquid for the southerners; white, yellow or any other color, and
flavored to suit the taste. The Hindu can eat no fat from the sacred
cow; the Mohammedan and the Jew can eat no fat from the abhorred pig;
the vegetarian will touch neither; other people will take both. No
matter, all can be accommodated.

All the fats and oils, though they consist of scores of different
compounds, have practically the same food value when freed from the
extraneous matter that gives them their characteristic flavors. They are
all practically tasteless and colorless. The various vegetable and
animal oils and fats have about the same digestibility, 98 per cent.,[3]
and are all ordinarily completely utilized in the body, supplying it
with two and a quarter times as much energy as any other food.

It does not follow, however, that there is no difference in the
products. The margarin men accuse butter of harboring tuberculosis germs
from which their product, because it has been heated or is made from
vegetable fats, is free. The butter men retort that margarin is lacking
in vitamines, those mysterious substances which in minute amounts are
necessary for life and especially for growth. Both the claim and the
objection lose a large part of their force where the margarin, as is
customarily the case, is mixed with butter or churned up with milk to
give it the familiar flavor. But the difficulty can be easily overcome.
The milk used for either but