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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

"Savor's 'butter' is easily produced and scalable, but convincing people to swap out butter and other dairy products for 'experimental' foods will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future."

Really? Margarine has always been pretty popular, surely this is not dissimilar.

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It wasn’t always popular. In fact it took tremendous effort of public deception, corruption and lobbying to make margarine a staple today. But I’m sure Gates has pockets deep enough to repeat that.

Nice story but if anything, it was the other way around: "By the late-19th century, some 37 companies were manufacturing margarine in the US, in opposition to the butter industry, which protested and lobbied for government intervention, eventually leading to the 1886 Margarine Act imposing punitive fees against margarine manufacturers." (Wikipedia)

That’s the original margarine that was actually made from decent ingredients like beef tallow. No one knows this nor refers to that as margarine in the current age.

The margarine as we know it today was invented later, in the 20th century and was made from vegetable oils.

It was full of trans fats and was a major contributor to heart disease and obesity.

The comment explains who lobbied for what.

The same could be said about the meat and dairy industry and various other foods. But what’s the problem with this CO2 butter? Just more fear of novel foods like the comment above predicted?

Could’ve said the same thing about margarine. It’s made from vegetable oil, which is made from vegetables after all. What could go wrong?

> Margarine has always been pretty popular

Has it? There are people who use it for ethical or cost saving reasons, but I've never seen anyone say that they actually prefer the taste over butter.

1kg of margarine per person globally. I'd say it's pretty popular.

https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/oils-fats/margarin...

Only 1kg for an entire year?

It was oddly popular where I lived during the 1990’s/2000’s for a while - largely due to a lot of marketing pushing it as healthier than butter.

I’m not sure exactly when that “turned back around”, but I think it was the 2010’s - now butter is the default and margarine is seen as rubbish.

Margarine doesn’t have trans fats anymore but people, even in these comments in 2024, are still catching up with that fact. As they do, it’s becoming popular again among the health conscious market.

Should have probably invented a new product name for it though, but modern margarine uses different processes than partial hydrogenation.

> invented a new product name

I have seen some margarines sold as vegan butter.

And most "truffle" oil is made from petroleum.

I think the newness is something people can easily get over if it actually tastes good and isn't expensive.

Consider the GMO panic. People will be against the concept for a long time, no matter how reasonable that position is.

Consider trans fats in partially hydrogenated margarines.

How does that relate to modern margarine or Savor’s product?

Sometimes the public has good reason to be cautious. We often don't know what we don't know. Having said that, I don't consider the anti-GMO position to be reasonable.

We know that saturated fats are bad for the same reasons we know trans fats are bad but that doesn’t stop people from eating butter. But yeah, it’s very easy to make people scared of novel food. Though we know much more about nutrition than we did when trans fats were thought to be better than butter. But that doesn’t let butter off the hook just because there’s something worse than it.

> We know that saturated fats are bad for the same reasons we know trans fats are bad

I question this assertion.

Saturated fats have a weaker but similar effect to trans fats, namely the increase of ApoB serum levels which are independently causal in atherosclerosis. This isn’t the best place to rehash the scientific consensus but it should be easy enough to find online if you stay away from social media charlatans.

People will do anything to resist swallowing that pill because bacon and butter taste good, but we’ve known this for decades.

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