On Food and Cooking

supply for his poorly nourished but growing
urban populace. Others before Hippolyte
Mège-Mouriès had modified solid animal
fats, but he had the novel idea of flavoring
beef tallow with milk and working the
mixture like butter.
Margarine caught on quickly in the major
European butter producers and exporters —
Holland, Denmark, and Germany — in part
because they had surplus skim milk from
butter making that could be used to flavor
margarine. In the United States large-scale
production was underway by 1880. Here, the
dairy industry and its allies in government put
up fierce resistance in the form of
discriminatory taxes that persisted into the
1970s. Today, basic margarine remains cheap
compared to butter, and Americans consume
more than twice as much margarine as butter.
Scandinavia and northern Europe also favor
margarine, while France and Britain still give
a substantial edge to butter.