"A Wholesome Article of Food": Rhetoric of Health and Nation in Canada's Oleomargarine Debates, 1917-1924.

This article examines the rhetoric employed in the 1917-1924 debates over oleomargarine's legalization in Canada, noting that health, extending from the individual to the collective body, emerged as a key battle cry. Oleomargarine was at once a tool of citizenship and a nexus for new theories of food science, anxieties about race and otherness, women's emerging political influence, and contention about the roles of both industry and government in dictating food choices. As both sides promulgated their respective products' contributions to personal and national welfare, health and citizenship stood as entwined ideals, inviolable but not uncontested.

Academic freedom or political maneuvers: Theodore W. Schultz and the oleomargarine controversy revisited.

The oleomargarine controversy was a case of academic freedom in which nineteen researchers resigned from Iowa State College to protest pressure from the dairy industry to change their research findings. This article explores the ways in which the boundaries between science and politics were more blurred than they seemed at the time or in subsequent historical treatments. The argument begins with a history of the unique composition of agricultural economics research at Iowa State, refocuses the affair from a conflict between the state college and the dairy industry to one among a much larger number of actors, and concludes by demonstrating that one professor, Theodore Schultz, was in the process of transitioning to a new career in prescriptive policy work with private policy associations that ended up being opposed to the practices and policy goals of some of the farm organizations in question.