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I recognize that most people seem to equate eating butter with a dangerous flirtation with death and so I'm trying to make the switch to margarine. I just can't get images of things coming to life in the fridge - like the talking Parkay tub or The Stuff - out of my mind, though, and they freak me out.
Reading this passage from The Secret House doesn't help matters:
"Margarine is made from fat. It was first invented in response to an award offered by the French Emperor, Napoleon III, after the urban rebellions of 1848 to find a cheap source of fat for the working classes who could not afford butter. Today there's soya fat in margarine, also the fat you get from squished herrings, and about 20 per cent of the total is beef fat or even nice old-fashioned lard—pig's fat. All these fats are mixed together and melted, and if you think molten pig's fat smells bad, you should wait till you've had the misfortune to walk through a factory where it's being stirred in with boiling herring and other fats. The whole mess is so repulsive, so clearly distasteful and unmarketable (it comes out colored grey on top of it all) that before anything else is done it has to be funneled into even larger deodorizing vats to try to get rid of the stink.
"What comes out of the deodorizer, while at least it can be approached without gagging, is still not quite the tempting substance commercial margarine is supposed to be. It's grey, it's sticky, and it's far, far too chunky. The grey gloop is poured into another vat, metal shavings are clunked in before it, then the vat is screwed shut and high-pressure hydrogen gas is sprayed in. The fats are boiled and compressed in there, they react with the nickel and hydrogen, and when finally the ordeal is over and the top taken off, the lumps are gone."
