From 1 January 1888 ‘all substances, whether compound or otherwise, prepared in imitation of butter’ had to be offered for sale under the name of margarine. I can’t pretend that this date is exactly a round number, but it seems more admirable than some of the anniversaries trotted out over the past week.
Is this Act still in force, does anyone know? If it is, the supermarket shelves require rearrangement. The Act was a triumph for the margarinists over the butterinists, for the latter, represented by grocers’ wholesalers, wanted to continue calling such spreadables butterine, especially when they had been churned up with perhaps 10 per cent of milk.
You can see what was in it for the butterinists, who preferred a name sounding more natural, rural and healthy, even though language has an inflationary tendency, which would soon have rendered butterine worthless in conveying the hoped-for connotation.
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