Heck, carbon dioxide is only one ATOM away from deadly carbon monoxide! Oooo scary.
(It’s the dihydrogen monoxide that you REALLY have to watch out for.)
Margarine was also invented either some time in the1700s or 1800s (I forget exactly when, and I’m not digging through my books for a cite for this) in France becuase workers in the factories at the time couldn’t afford to buy butter for their bread, and thus didn’t have enough energy to be very productive on the job (tending to fall over and pass out a lot, it seems). So, one of the factory owners had a chemist figure out something that could be made cheaply to take the place of butter so that factory workers could put in a full 20 hour (or whatever it was they were working) day. Apparently, the thought that they could just pay their workers a few more francs never occured to them.
Its Quebec that still bans margarine from being dyed to simulate butter colour.
I remember James Burke going on about that in an episode of Connections! 
Yup, and I’m too lazy to dig up my copy of the book to find the exact dates, etc.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think I remember reading that the manufacturers went to court to win the right to use the name.
A bit of Googling brought up this case (PDF file), brought by the makers against another firm making a spread by the name of “You’d Butter Believe It” (groan), which says in passing:
I remember the newspaper adverts using this TV ban as publicity; they said something like “We’re only telling you what we’re not”.
Not true - there is a world of difference between saturates and unsaturates, and cis and trans fats.
From Visser again:
I won’t quote the original recipe and process; it’s stomach-churning and I mean that literally (i.e., it included sheep’s stomachs and cows’ udders).
Canola is black. Canola oil, however, is a light golden colour.
Isn’t butter naturally white, too? (Well, sort of an off-white “cream” color, anyway.)
I remember in the Laura Ingalls Wilder series that when Ma made butter, she added a bit of carrot juice to make the butter a pretty yellow color.
The organic butter that I buy has a lable on the back which says, “The color of our butter varies according to season because we do not add color.” This leads me to wonder what the cows are eating which causes the variation.
I assume that it’s a preference of the American public that butter be yellow and cheese be orange, and so these colors are always added to the product because that’s what people expect.
Butter is naturally off-white to a light yellow, depending on the time of the year the milk was taken and the cow’s diet.
You’re unlikely to find any added colors in any butter in the US, organic or otherwise (I won’t say “inorganic”).
Canola is a contrived name used to market rapeseed oil, which, due to an unfortunate moniker, would otherwise be difficult to sell.
But you are correct; rapeseed, from which canola oil is derived, is indeed black.
I know very well what canola is, thank you very much. My uncle was one of the team of plant breeders that developed it. The naming of the crop was never solely because of the rather unfortunate name of rapeseed. Canola’s nutrional properties are substantially different from rapeseed, as the nature of the fats contained in the oil was heavily modified. My uncle always laughs when people talk about GM canola - “It’s all genetically modified,” he says. Though of course, they didn’t do any gene splicing during development the way that Monsanto did in creating the glyphosphate-resistant strain. Anyways. The point is, insisting on calling canola ‘rapeseed’ makes you no more correct than insisting on calling Royal Galas ‘apples’, and indeed, less so, since margarine made of non-canola rapeseed oil would be a horrible product for reasons besides just its name, whereas canola oil-based margarine is a fine product.
But butter IS white (or nearly so) in the US … ? At least all I’ve seen. The butter here is quite yellow, and there are no dyes listed on the pack. Always thought that odd.
Here’s a picture of one of those margarine products with the dye packs.
**Dr. Lao ** it appears that some butter does have added color. The USDA has a page that describes the assignment of grades to butter (PDF) which says,
(bolding mine)
This site says that adding color to butter is “optional”.
Apparently, one of the most common colorings is annatto.
“If you stew apples like cranberries, they taste more like prunes than rhubarb does.” –Groucho Marx
What, exactly, is your point? That I shouldn’t call canola ‘canola’, because you think I should use a less specific term that’s fallen into disuse? Here’s a hint: in my province this year, there are expected to be just shy of 6 million acres seeded to canola. There will be 0 acres seeded to non-canola rapeseed. Why should I should I take pains to explicate the nature of canola? Why is it a problem to use a crop’s variety name rather than its species name? Maybe we should be calling it Brassica napus instead. Surely that’s more correct than either canola or rapeseed.
They’re both bad for you.
Butter just tastes better, is all.
mmm butter… if only it would spread from the fridge.
just to jump on the whole canola tangent…
I live in ireland and i never knew what canola was… over here it’s rapeseed or oilseed rape.
also butter here is quite yellow in colour. not sure why. don’t think that any colour is added. cattle here are fed almost exclusively on grass, maybe that has something to do with it.
well i learned something new.
It does. I grew up on a small mixed farm, and we milked 1-2 cows just for family consumption. Milk and products made from it were much yellower in the summertime when the cows’ diet was largely fresh grass than in winter when it was grains and hay.