Don't Get Me Started - 7

I suppose we were like millions of other families; I didn't think so at the time, and I still don't. No one should have to eat oleomargarine - especially if there was such a thing as butter. Now there was a cow giving her all to make humans happy. Butter would melt in your mouth; it was delicious. I was caught more than once with a "sharp" knife shaving off the end of the butter (when we were lucky enough to have some in the house) and letting it melt on my tongue. Why waste the taste on a cracker or a piece of bread? Put it right on your tongue, man, to get the full flavor.

To this day I feel profound sorrow, some disgust and a great deal of pity for the Kitchen Queen and her idiot mate twirling and flouncing about a fake kitchen proclaiming to the entire world that they can't tell that oleomargarine is not butter. Frankly, it's not the sort of thing that a normal person with any taste would admit even under torture. Can you imagine what a poor sense of taste must exist to not be able to tell the difference? That's where the pity comes in. How old was I when I made this discovery? I must have been all of seven; the year 1944.

Oleomargarine, part of the low-fat American diet dedicated to killing off the population as fast as can reasonably be expected, is a loathsome substance crafted by the local chemist as a substitute for butter so that the people would have something to smear on their toast while butter was somehow used in the War Effort. I have no notion what they did with it, and it really doesn't matter. I wasn't getting any butter since the price was too high to afford more than a quarter pound once in a blue moon. (Do you like that "blue moon" part? That's what the adults sounded like back then. They seemed to think it made them appear smarter or more worldly. I still think it is as stupid now as it was then. I was a difficult child.)

Oleomargarine was nasty. The consistence was too oily, it was too shiny and the taste was neutral, sort of like Vaseline. The butter boys had them by the throat. They had to sell it in an uncolored state - dead, yucky white. What a coup for Wisconsin. No one was likely to mistake oleomargarine for butter. They did include a small packet of red-orange powder that the consumer had to sprinkle over the dead white slippery mess and mix in thoroughly, trying to fake the butter color and fool themselves for just a second that somehow they had managed to score a whole pound of butter. It wasn't even close. The color looked like several of those colors in the crayon box that are always whole because no self-respecting child will touch them -- by instinct.

The fake red-orange pseudo butter-colored powder did have a taste--gross. How do I know? I was in charge of mixing the margarine for the family. For some reason beyond me we were a Parkay family. The external packet method of sale didn't last long because it created a mess. It was possible to get the yucky powder on just about everything and I should know because I did. When you squandered the fake coloring you forced the whole family to eat their margarine white. For years we kept an extra packet of sickening red-orange powder in the silverware drawer just in case something happened and we were faced with the prospect of eating the white goo again.

Notice that the floggers of the substitute spread were trying to get rid of the oleo part of the product's name. I guess market research found that the public felt happier about margarine. By now, it came in a heavy plastic bag. The red-orange powder had changed to red-orange liquid encased in another piece of plastic which you pinched to break it and then kneeded the bag until the hideously fake color had contaminated the entire bag. (Is this part of Better Living Through Chemistry?) When the margarine looked like butter or the color was spread uniformly (whichever came first), the package was placed in the refrigerator to harden. If you continued working the bag, trying for the butter color, the insides would get runny and plastic fatigue would set in, creating many pin hole leaks and a general mess. I know this.

I don't know when oleomargarine broke butter's strangle hold and got to fake the color of butter or wrap it in quarters or write butter on the carton more times than the carton of real butter. It really doesn't make any difference. I remember where oleomargarine started and they haven't caught up yet even though they have gone so far as to mix real butter into the chemical mess called margarine. My only use for yucky, white, oleomargarine was to grease the axles of my wooden wagon (sorry folks, it was war time) so it would outlast the war until I could get a metal one. That is still the highest and best use for oleomargarine; to blithely announce that you can't tell the difference between oleo and butter is rather like having a VCR that blinks on noon in an age where six year old's run 200 MHZ desktop computers. Try harder; you're looking foolish.

The FoodGuy
Ross Nickerson
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