Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hey Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

But our substitutes have a rich history, but lest we spread ourselves too thin, we'll concentrate

on the particularly curious period between the 1880s and the 1950s, when Margarine was

outlawed in Canada, and margarine hungry Canadians bootleged the stuff.

Newfoundland manufactured margarine because it made good sense.

Its climate was too cold to reliably source cream from cows, and margarine could be made with a combination of vegetable, mineral, and animal oils, most notably seal oil.

This made margarine remarkably cheaper to produce than butter.

Those cost savings trickled down to the consumer, making margarine available to every strata of society.

New Finland's margarine manufacturers were committed to keeping their customers loyal,

and that meant keeping them incentivized to eat it.

In 1931, when nutritional study findings revealed that Newfoundlanders were deficient in vitamins A and D,

margarine manufacturers added those ingredients to their product.

This isn't as nefarious as it might sound.

Additives make it into food products all the time.

Look for labels that say fortified with to get an idea of which foods in your pantry are

pumped up with vitamins. So everyone could afford margarine and everyone got a little more of vitamins

A and D when they ate it. Plus the booming margarine business kept people in the

workforce. It's all win-win, right? At the time, Newfoundland was still a British colony. In

1949 it became part of Canada, where dairy farmers were fiercely protective of their trade.

In fact, Margarine had been outlawed in Canada since 1886.

Canada's parliament passed federal legislation in 1949

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