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Aug 2, 2003 Butter! What is butter? Since World War II, I havent put butter on our table. First of all, we couldnt get butter without a ration coupon by 1943 along with meat, fat, eggs and sugar. At that time, I was living in Northern New York State in the heart of dairy and farm country so milk and eggs were easy to get for us rural folk. In 1944, I went to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona. Arizona became my home state. Then, after the war, when Jim Hart and I were first married, we couldnt afford butter when it again became available. Jim was born in Wisconsin, the Dairy State, and felt it was almost sinful to put any spread other than butter on the dining table. Then he met me and the white oleo. The powerful Dairy Lobby in Washington, D.C. finally agreed to allow oleo margarine to be sold as a butter substitute but it had to be white, even though oleo had been created by a French chemist in the 1850s. I still remember sitting on the old twin bed that had been converted into a couch in our one bedroom, upstairs apartment which had been a fraternity house a few years before. It was located at 1041 N. Park Avenue down the street from the main gate to the University. It was the summer of 1948 and I was seven months pregnant with our first to-be-born. It was mid August, humid and hotter than Hades in Tucson. I had this blob of white stuff called oleo margarine sealed in a plastic pouch in my hands. The invention of plastic was one of the positive things that emerged from the war. The pouch contained a red capsule that had to be popped open, inside the pouch, to spread the coloring throughout the blob to create the appealing yellow color of real butter. I bought my plastic pouch oleo at the Safeway store across the street. It was cheap and made a good spread for bread that ordinarily called for butter. So, I sat there on my little couch, breaking the plastic capsule and kneading and kneading until the food coloring was evenly spread throughout the pouch to create yellow margarine. It sometimes took half an hour or so to do the job right so to pass the time, I listened to soap operas like Pepper Youngs Family and Our Gal Sunday on the radio. Once the gooey white blob became the gooey yellow blob it was put in the old fashioned ice box to cool down. By suppertime, it was spreadable but messy. Getting the margarine out of the plastic pouch, then, became a source of fun and games during the dinner hour. Yellow oleo came of age when the Dairy Lobby finally realized it could no longer control the wrath of American housewives who were sick and tired of breaking red capsules into white blobs, kneading and kneading to create a yellow blob of margarine attractive enough to make it to the dinner table. Housewives of the world must have also united because margarine is produced all over the globe, now, made from oils of various vegetals soybean, sunflower, peanut, safflower, cotton, corn, etc. Blended oils are mixed with skim milk or cream and several ingredients are added such as vitamin A, carotene, lecithin and preservatives to enhance its nutritive value and appearance. Ladies, weve come a long way from the days of the white blob of oleo in the plastic pouch with the food coloring capsule to all of the margarine products offered in todays supermarkets. Im convinced this simple act of creating the margarine, that we buy now in plastic tubs, gave birth to the rise of feminism and the downfall of American society on the day the housewife was free to pursue goals other than kneading white oleo into yellow margarine. ------------ About the author: Bobbie Hart ONeill is a retired print media journalist, CSU-Sacramento, 74, with 40 years experience in the field. She has worked as a reporter, feature writer, columnist, public relations writer, magazine/newsletter editor and publisher. She is currently a freelance writer residing in Yuma, Arizona and has published a childrens book, written three screenplays and a novel. In addition, she is interested in civic affairs, politics, current events, ethnology and animals. Email Bobbie: bobbieo@digitaldune.net Comment on this column in the forum. Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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