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Some butters are as white as margarine in colour, and from a health point
of view there is on more reason for forbidding the addition of colouring matter
to margarine than there is to forbid its addition to butters to which it is
frequently added, so long as it is a harmless vegetable colouring matter used
in small quantities.
But the most objectionable feature of this Bill is the proposed definition of
margarine. The experience of your Public Health Committee is that margarine,
which was originally made from beef and mutton fats, and generally recommended
by the medical profession as a wholesome food equal to butter in
nutritive and digestive values, is steadily deteriorating by the increasing
proportion of vegetable fats of which it is being composed, and that if the
proportion of animal fats can with impunity sink as low as 10 per cent, there
is nothing to prevent margarine being sold which will contain on animal fat at
all. This undesirable result should be averted.
It has been regarded as essential that those who intend to purchase and eat
butter should be protected from the fraudulent substitution of other fats.
Those who intend to purchase and eat animal fats other than butter have a
right to equal protection from the substitution of cheap vegetable fats of less
nutritive and digestive values. If the medical profession and the public find
that margarine is not only no longer what they believed it to be, namely, that
margarine is the prepared fat of the ox, just as butter is the prepared fat of the
milk of the cow, but is not even composed of animal fats, it will do infinite
damage to the use of a wholesome article of food.
If manufacturers and distributers wish to make and sell vegetable fats for
those who desire them, there is nothing to prevent them, and no objection,
provided that they are not denominated " margarine," so as to mislead the
public into imagining that they are composed of animal fats.
I beg therefore to recommend—
(1) That the Sale of Margarine Bill be strongly opposed at the proper
time.
(2) That immediate representations be made to the Board of
ture and to the Local Government Board urging the desirability
of amending the definition of margarine in Section 13 of the Putter
and Margarine Act, 1907, by the addition of the words " solely of
animal fats or animal oils " after the word " food," so as to read—
" the expression ' margarine ' shall mean any article of food con"
sisting solely of animal fats or animal oils, whether mixed with
" butter or not, which resembles butter, and is not milk-blended
" butter."
This will not preclude the sale of vegetable fats and oils either under their
proper names, or, if mixtures, as vegetable lmtter or butter substitutes.
I have, etc.,
John F. J. Sykes,
Medical Officer of Health.