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.
Facebook
LinkedIn
RSS Feed
Townhall Column
Twitter Feed
YouTube