Can you Believe it’s not Butter?

Like many of her generation who struggled to manage a household during wartime rationing, my grandmother was steadfastly against margarine. Yucky, tasteless stuff, she said. Give her good old farmhouse butter any day of the week.

She would be truly horrified to see the dairy aisle at the supermarket today. This one lowers cholesterol. This one will shrink your waistline. This one spreads like a dream. This one isn’t actually butter at all but is made with some kind of bean juice that works just the same. You name it, it does it. Advertising gone mad?

One of Mass Observation Online’s Topic Collections includes some comical studies of the infamous butter versus margarine debate, which had 1940s housewives writhing in exasperation. The debate dates from the First World War, when margarine was a comparatively new product - grey and greasy and, apparently, disgusting. It was intended to replace butter, which was at that time mostly imported from abroad and therefore one of many products cut from the national shopping list to save the government money. Until the armistice it was all that many people could get. During the inter-war years everyone returned to their former grease of choice, until rationing in the Second World War put marge back on their tables. Cue loud groans from housewives up and down the nation. In an attempt to give marge a make-over and boost sales, Stork embarked on a rather desperate-sounding advertising campaign.

MO’s own studies via directive questionnaires showed that a lot of people felt that there was a social stigma about marge as being ‘the poor man’s substitute’ for butter, and that as a result they hadn’t actually tried it since the First World War when it had been truly revolting, and, so say, far inferior to what Stork was now offering.

But the question is, did the campaign actually work? Mass Observation asked the question, and responses from panellists are mixed, as one might expect. Here are just a few:

I’d rather eat my bread dry than with margarine.

Marge? Don’t talk to me of that stuff. The smell is enough – ugh! It’s all affecting the poor more than the rich. Disgraceful, that’s what it is.

Margarine isn’t so bad when you get used to it, but it isn’t like butter.

Dislike it [margarine] but admit that this is, perhaps, but prejudice.

As soon as I know it is margarine, it does taste different.

The upshot seems to be that while many people were prepared to give Stork the benefit of the doubt and at least give it a try, a large proportion still could not be shaken from their belief that, whatever the adverts said, it just wasn’t the same as the real thing.