The Yellow Peril

Oleomargarine is an unobtrusive substance which some people like to spread on bread. This is hard to believe, for during the last few months various people have soberly called margarine everything from "sneaky" to a "violation of God's law."

These people happen to be the friends or relatives of people who own cows. And cows eventually produce butter. The only trouble is that butter is considerably more expensive than oleo. Margarine, in turn, is normally an unpalatable white. So the butter people, who have been in business longer, have pressured in a mass of laws to keep the margarine industry from coloring its product, for they thought colored oleo could put a big hole in their business.

Most of these laws are being repealed. Nine states got rid of anti-margarine legislation during the last two years; the Senate has a bill before it now to kill the Federal oleo tax. It has been a hard and unusual fight. A recent House measure wanted to give oleo an attractive deep Sunkist orange hue. An eminent lobbyist has stated that yellow is "butter's own color," and that if margarine makers wanted a color they could damn well dye their stuff green. The oleo-makers retaliated to this with a barrage of bright yellow advertisements. One southerner fought heroically for butter until he found that his constituents were growing the chief ingredients of margarine, upon which discovery he neatly reversed his field and became an oleo-man.

The cowmen have been gypping the consumer long enough. Their color argument is ridiculous, for the butter people color their own stuff half the year. And they really have little to worry about. An English newspaper went around feeding butter and margarine to blindfolded housewives and found that most of the women preferred butter anyway. A lot of people would benefit from untaxed oleo; it is about time yellow margarine got a friendly pat from the government.