My only exposure to the word oleo was in crossword puzzles, where it used to be used often.
Yep. Seen it there too.
Often used instead of butter during the Depression so grandmas are a lot of the exposure for people of a certain age.
Sure, 75% vowels. “Ulee”, the gold guy may have surpassed it crossword frequency of usage now.
Also, oreo and olio.
Speaking of oleo, when margarine was introduced in the late 1800s as a cheap butter substitute, it was naturally white—unappealing to folks used to yellow butter. So, manufacturers began adding yellow dye, but the dairy industry pushed back hard, lobbying for laws banning the sale of pre-colored margarine. Some states even required margarine to be dyed pink to make it even less appetizing. As a workaround, margarine makers included a separate capsule of yellow dye, leaving it up to consumers to mix it in at home.
Families would knead the margarine and dye together until it looked like butter. This was a common part of household life in the first half of the 20th century. I recall my grandmother discussing it often. White reminded people of lard, and nobody wants to spread lard on their toast. During World War II, butter was scarce and expensive, and public support for margarine grew. Gradually, states repealed the coloring bans, and by the 70s, margarine could be sold pre-colored.
In Wisconsin, up until 1967, Wisconsin had some interesting laws around the manufacture and sale of margarine, in order to protect the dairy industry. You could not sell, or manufacture, yellow margarine (i.e., which would look like butter) in the state, as @Tibby notes in the previous post. Wisconsin residents who wanted margarine had two choices:
- Buy white-colored margarine (eeew), which came with little yellow tablets of dye, and work the dye in by hand, so it looked like you were spreading butter, rather than lard, on your toast.
- Drive just over the state line, where there were, in fact, stores which advertised that they sold “colored (i.e., yellow) oleo” to Wisconsin shoppers. Below are a couple of photos of such places in Lake County, Illinois, just south of the state line.
My grandmother – born in 1902, lifelong Wisconsin resident – called it “oleo,” too.
Also scary nonsense propaganda about how margarine is ‘one molecule away from plastic’
Yeah, I remember when somebody on my friends listed posted that meme. I responded “What the hell does that even mean? Even if it were true, why would it matter? In the form of O2, oxygen is colorless, odorless and all animals require it to live. O3, just one more oxygen atom, is ozone. Ozone is faintly blue, has a very distinctive smell and is highly toxic.”
Or NaCl.
Sodium is not an easy thing to handle.
Chlorine is certainly toxic.
Put them together and they are in almost everything you eat and almost certainly in nearly everyone’s kitchen.
In kosher restaurants, you’ll still see margarine served in triangular patties - because federal law requires that colored margarine has to be shaped that way if it’s not labeled as “margarine.”
Maybe it depends on the medium they are advertising through because Blue Chew is one of the sponsors of Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa’s Talking Sopranos podcast and they get very, very specific about its alleged features.
I think people are expected to associate blue with Viagra tablets.
My mother liked to buy these cheap puzzle magazines picked up at the supermarket, which had incredibly stupid advertisements in them (one I recall was for a “magic Buddha” you rubbed for luck).
One advertisement however spent a lot of words explaining how mystically awesome and empowering the product was while talking in great detail about all the things it wasn’t. To such an extent it appeared to rule out anything physically real. No proof because neither of us was stupid enoguh to buy it, but I was pretty sure at the time they were selling empty boxes.
That’s exactly what it is - a mix of hydrocarbons that is sold as a drop in replacement for r134a.
I don’t see why they would, because it’s also possible to artificially produce saturated fats.
Science lesson: A fatty acid consists mostly of a long chain of carbons, bonded to each other and to hydrogens (plus some interesting bits on the ends that aren’t relevant here). A saturated fatty acid has as many hydrogens as it possibly can: All of the carbon-carbon bonds are single bonds, so there are as many bonds as possible left over for hydrogen. This makes a saturated fatty acid straight. Fats that are high in saturated fatty acids tend to be solid at room temperature. They mostly come from animal sources.
An unsaturated fatty acid has one or more double bonds between the carbons. If it’s just one, then it’s monounsaturated; if there are more, it’s polyunsaturated. These have fewer hydrogens, because some bonds are “wasted” on the double bonds. Everywhere this happens, there’s a bend in the chain. Because of these bent chains, fats high in unsaturated fatty acids tend to be liquid at room temperature. They mostly come from plant sources.
A trans-fatty acid has exactly two double bonds, right next to each other. Because of this, the chain bends once, but then bends right back, so it’s almost straight. Because of this almost-straightness, they behave physically a lot like saturated fats, and so are also solid at room temperature. Technically, this makes trans fats a kind of polyunsaturated fat, but they’re usually considered a separate category.
You can take an unsaturated fatty acid, and artificially make it more saturated by doing something called hydrogenating it. The more you hydrogenate it, the solider it gets. It used to be that they made things like margarine and Crisco by starting with unsaturated vegetable oils and partially hydrogenating them, until it got to the desired consistency. This process produced a mix of all kinds of fats, including trans fats.
Nowadays, what they usually do instead is fully hydrogenating the vegetable oils, to get pure saturated fat (with no unsaturated nor trans fat). Then, to get the consistency you want, you take that pure saturated fat and mix it with some amount of unsaturated vegetable oil. That way, you don’t get any trans fats. And you’re still using all plant-based sources, which is good for kosher and vegan products.
An eight-year-old boy walks into a drugstore, and says “I’d like a package of Tampax, please.”. The clerk asks “Why do you want Tampax?” The boy says “The commercials say that with Tampax, you can swim, ride a bike, and climb a tree, and I can’t do any of those things yet.”.
Well, obviously if you take a margarine molecule, and replace the margarine molecule with a plastic molecule, now you have a plastic molecule.
Watching hockey right now reminds me there will typically be logos on the boards for organizations I have never heard of who do finance and other things. They don’t advertise a product or service and they don’t list a website or phone number. Just the name of the company, you figure it out. Seems like more of a “look how rich we are” kind of ad than any actual attempt to drum up new business.
Oh, I sit corrected. Thanks!
Reminds me of a billboard I’ve seen around town lately, for a company called “Carrier Ohio”. Their logo is the word “Carrier” in an oval, superimposed on the outline of the state. That’s all that’s on the billboards.
If I at least knew what they made or did, then I’d know if I was part of their target market, and might look them up.
For years, I saw billboards that said only “I Hate Steven Singer!”. I wondered what they were advertising every now and then. This was before I had a smart phone. I never bothered to Google it after I got home. It wasn’t until I was on the bus with a friend who did have a smart phone that I learned Steven Singer sells jewelry.