86 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



ter. It is a well known fact among these men that the majority 

 of people dislike to put oleomargarine on the table uncolored. 

 It does not resemble butter and anyone can tell they are using 

 oleomargarine, while if it is colored they cannot tell it, perhaps, 

 and they don't feel quite so guilty about the use of oleomarga- 

 rine. That is where the whole fight is going to hinge, and the 

 Dairy Union has taken the position that we must have color re- 

 strictions. 



The Dairy Union has a bill drawn up which we hope to 

 get before Congress at some time when conditions seem oppor- 

 tune upon such a color standard. It has been a very difficult 

 matter to establish this color standard. It seems to be a very 

 different matter to measure color. The Bureau of Standards at 

 Washington has been working on this matter, and they thought 

 before they began experimental work that they had very definite 

 methods of measuring color, but they find they are very unreli- 

 able and do not give accurate results. 



The apparatus most commonly in use, the Loveland tino- 

 meter, by which they secure standards by colored slides, they 

 find to vary greatly. The apparatus has been used largely in 

 the marketing of cotton seed oil. The value of the oil depends 

 on the color that it contains and is sold on that basis. The Gov- 

 ernment standards are very strict on that. They came up against 

 cases where the stuff had been passed at one point at a certain 

 standard of color, and at another point was rejected with the 

 same analysis, and when they came to compare slides found a 

 wide variation. So they have been up in the air for some time 

 and the Bureau of Standards is not yet ready to assure us that 

 they have a measurement of color that will be entirely satisfac- 

 tory. 



The nearest that we can come to it is this. They asked the 

 Dairy Union to submit a sample of oleomargarine of a color as 

 high as we thought was permissible. The directors selected a 

 sample of oleomargarine from a factory in Cincinnati, supposed 

 to be made from normal ingredients, without using blanched 

 oils. It had a very light shade of yellow, and the Bureau of 

 Standards proposed to measure this sample by all the known 



