Canada's Great Butter Caper

Abstract

In 2005, Canada's Supreme Court ruled on Quebec's longstanding law prohibiting the sale of yellow margarine. While the precise color of margarine might seem trivial, the dispute carries on the country's century-old tradition of placing margarine in the legal spotlight. Margarine's long and bizarre history opens the door for probing the notion of legislative intent and the belief in a product's communicative potential. The buttery impostor has been banned, outlawed, bootlegged, taxed and color-coded—and even implicated in the Canadian Constitution. Inspired by Arjun Appadurai's claim that “objects have social lives,” this analysis provides a legal “biography” of margarine in Canada from 1886 to the present. Here, margarine becomes the stuff through which one can speak to the slippery intersection between society, law and the lobbyist. Not only does it reveal the evolution of legal and popular communication around a single object, it also illuminates the ways in which the scandal of “miscommunication” can be used to serve particular ends.

Keywords:

• margarine
• legislation
• food law
• margarine ban
• food color
• food regulation
• anthropology of food
• Canada