November, 2013:

How will the new FDA trans fat ban impact the 144 year old margarine industry?

Vintage Dutch Margarine Ad from 1893, Rotterdam – Wikipedia Commons

According to that inimitable news agency FOX NEWS, the five top foods that will be affected are:

• Microwave popcorn
• Cookies and crackers
• Refrigerated dough and pie crust
• Coffee creamers
• & Margarines!

Now granted, I’ve always hated margarine since I was a very young child when my Oma used to roll out the Blue Band Margarine (Unilever) for our breakfast sandwich, which the Dutch call a boterham (which literally means butter-ham and whose etymology is still unknown according to a Dutch Wikipedia article, with original spellings being boteram or boterram). Even after spreading the oleo over the milky white slice of Dutch bread and slathering it with chocolate sprinkles, hagelslag (colored sugar crystals), powdered cheese, or muisjes (which literally means ‘little mice,’ and are identical to the delicious multicolored sugar-coated anise seed sprinkles that Americans are accustomed to scooping up on their way out of Indian restaurants as an after-dinner condiment) – I still wasn’t having it. Dutch butter is so delicious, I couldn’t understand why my grandmother still used margarine.

In retrospect, I realize that during WWII, there weren’t any available dairy products, let alone any available food. My mother and her family literally starved during the last winter of the German occupation of Amsterdam in 1944, surviving solely on tulip bulbs dug up from neighboring frozen gardens and rotting potato peels rummaged from garbage pails. After the blockades were lifted during the Liberation by the Canadians and British troops, margarine became wildly popular in the Netherlands because it was cheaper than butter and already had been part of the Dutch menu for over 60 years.

Margarine was invented in France when in 1869, Emperor Louis Napoleon III offered a reward to anyone who could develop a cheaper version of butter to be rationed to the military and also sold to the lower classes. The result was oleomargarine (which was mostly made of hydrogenated animal fat), an invention of French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès who after two years of failed marketing in France sold his patent to the Dutch company Jurgens, which since has also been engulfed by Unilever. In the article Labour Relations in the Dutch Margarine Industry 1870-1954,  Marlou Schrover explains the following about the burgeoning margarine industry:

Wars on the continent made transport difficult, and between 1865 and 1870 a cattle-plague in England diminished home production. The demand remained high and prices soared. A whole market for cheap butter threatened to be lost. Dutch traders sought for a cheap alternative to butter. This brought forth a new product, a mixture of purified fat, flavouring and colouring, which was marketed as butter until governments forbade this and enforced the name ‘margarine.’

Production of margarine was first taken up on an industrial scale by the two biggest Dutch butter traders: Jurgens and Van den Bergh. Jurgens and Van den Bergh merged in 1927 forming the Margarine Unie. Two years later, this firm, the world’s largest margarine producer, combined with the world’s largest soap producer, the British Lever Brothers, to form Unilever.

And according to the article on oleomargarine in Wikipedia, in that same year a German pharmacist from Cologne named Benedict Klein  “founded the first margarine factory Benedict Klein Margarinewerke, producing the brands Overstolz and Botteram.”Botteram? Perhaps this is from where the Dutch name for sandwich originates! It would make sense since often names of products we use get their monikers from their branding, as in Scotch tape or Bandaids.

The problem with margarine, which since 1950 no longer contains hydrogenated animal fat but almost strictly uses hydrogenated vegetable oils, is the hydrogenation process – which produces trans fat as a by-product. During the hydrogenation process, unsaturated oils which are normally liquid at room temperature have hydrogen passed through it in the presence of a “nickel catalyst,” which saturates the oil molecules with hydrogen causing their melting point to rise, thus hardening them so they don’t melt at room temperature. Today precious metals like palladium, platinum and rhodium are used as a catalyst instead of non-precious nickel which requires higher temperatures for the process to occur. The absence of a catalyst would require temperatures of 480°C / 900°F for hydrogenation to occur. The precious metal catalysts require lower temperatures and less energy.

The problem with this process are the by-product molecules that are produced. Not all of the molecules are fully saturated  and are incompletely hydrogenated. The cis versions of these molecules are found in nature and are easily handled by the human’s metabolically – but the trans versions of these incompletely hydrogenated molecules, which are mirror images of the natural molecules, are potentially dangerous to humans and are implicated in cardiovascular disease and higher risks of heart attacks. Metabolic disease expert Dr. Henry Pownall states that “artificial trans fatty acids are no longer needed in advanced technological societies.” In an online article New FDA Proposal Trying to Eliminate Trans Fat published by Science Daily on November 11, 2013, it was reported that according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “reducing trans fat consumption by avoiding artificial trans fats could prevent 10,000-20,000 heart attacks and 3,000-7,000 coronary heart disease deaths each year in the United States.” Margarine consumption, as well as many other foods that contain trans fats from donuts to artificial creamers, are the culprits of poor lipid levels in the blood and obesity. Trans fats are poisons and removing them from our diets will be a step towards a healthier society, although it wouldn’t eliminate them totally since trans fats are also found in nature in animal fats – especially when they are heated.

So where does this leave the margarine industry?  Many brands of oleo spreads have been vegan alternatives for a few decades,  such as products like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Promise, and Earth Balance, which purport to have zero grams of trans fat, yet have between 3.5 to 4.5 grams of saturated fat – the same amount as butter! Julia Child NEVER used margarine and it is no mystery as to why the nascent margarine industry failed miserably in France. Butter is better. Sorry Oma, give me that rich yellow and creamy Dutch cows butter, of course, in moderation. Even ants don’t eat margarine!

Found at Imgur Gallery

SOURCES & RECOMMENDED READING

• Oleomargarine – Wikipedia
• Hydrogenation – Wikipedia
• Boterham – Wikipedia NL
• Sara Albee Books – Believe It’s Not Butter– September 26, 2012
• Science Daily – New FDA Proposal Trying to Eliminate Trans Fat – November 11, 2013
• Fox News (ugh) – 5 foods that face changes with trans-fat ban – November 8, 2013
• Blue Band Website – NL
• Labor Relations in the Dutch Margarine Industry – Open Access – Leiden University NL (PDF)
• Better: Trans-fat-free sticks – Health dot com
• If margarine is healthier, why won’t ants eat it? – Christine Cronau