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Sama Hoole @SamaHoole - Julius Caesar's accounts of invading Britain, 55 BC, include observations about the Celtic tribes. One detail stands out: they ate enormous amounts of butter.
The Romans found this disgusting. Civilised people used olive oil. Butter was barbarian food. The mark of primitive Northern tribes who didn't understand proper cuisine.
Celtic Britons didn't care. They churned butter, ate butter, cooked with butter, and exported butter to other tribes. Butter was wealth. Butter was medicine. Butter was what kept you alive through British winters.
The Romans, eating their "civilised" olive oil and grain-based diet, noted that the Celts were significantly larger and stronger than Mediterranean peoples. Taller. Broader. More physically capable.
Fast forward to medieval Ireland. Bog butter. The Irish buried firkins of butter in peat bogs for preservation. Some of it aged for years before consumption. Archaeologists find 2,000-year-old butter in Irish bogs today.
Why butter? Because it was calorically dense, nutritionally complete, shelf-stable, and didn't require cooking fuel in regions where wood was scarce.
Fast forward to Victorian England. The stigma against butter intensifies. Not because of health concerns: those came later. Because butter was associated with rural poverty and "backwards" farming communities.
Upper classes used it minimally. Progressive doctors recommended against it. Butter eating was vulgar.
Then margarine arrives in the 1870s. Invented by French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès as cheap butter substitute for the French military. Made from beef tallow and milk.
Margarine was modern. Scientific. Progressive. Better than primitive butter.
By 1900, margarine manufacturers were adding yellow dye (originally it was white) and marketing it as healthier and more hygienic than butter. The campaign worked. Butter consumption declined among educated classes.
1950s: The anti-fat crusade begins. Butter becomes "artery-clogging saturated fat." Margarine becomes "heart-healthy spread."
The Celts, eating butter by the pound, were barbarians.
The Irish, burying butter in bogs, were primitive.
Your great-grandmother, cooking with butter, was killing herself.
Modern you, eating seed oil margarine, are being healthy.