The Yellow Margarine Ballot Measure

Fri, Jun 5 2009 by Staff

Throughout the month of June we will be looking at the history and impact of the ballot initiative, referendum and recall process.

These reforms, which started gaining popularity in the late 1800s, can be traced to the political philosophy of one of our founding father, Thomas Jefferson.

We wanted to start the series with a great piece by Paul Jacob, the President of the Citizens In Charge Foundation. For over 10 years Paul has hosted and authored Common Sense, a daily radio commentary.

In 2002 his commentary entitled “Yellow Margarine” discussed how average citizens stopped special interests from playing with their food by using the ballot initiative process.

Yellow Margarine

Over the last 100 years, the citizen initiative and referendum process has done great things. It has helped women win the right to vote, ended the discriminatory poll tax, and more recently, it brought us a number of government reforms one of my favorites being term limits. But let’s not forget the little things, either. Like yellow margarine.

Now, yellow margarine may not seem like anything special to you if you’ve never lived with margarine that’s … well, colorless. What the heck am I talking about, you ask? Back in the 1940s, when margarine first hit the food scene, the dairy producers weren’t very happy about it. They sold butter, and for every stick of margarine sold, it meant one less stick of butter. So, what did the powerful dairy industry do to compete? They went to the legislature to stop margarine producers from coloring their product yellow. And legislators passed laws to do just that. Really.

Well, if margarine wasn’t yellow, folks just might not feel right spreading it on their bread. It was the law. Until the voters in Michigan, Oregon and Washington, between 1949 and 1952, bypassed their legislature and passed a new law, saying, “Get real: margarine can be colored any color the folks who produce it think customers will like.”

It’s the initiative process that’s the story here, not the wonders of margarine. I much prefer butter, myself. I also prefer the people intervening directly when special interests have hijacked common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.