（原标题）人造黄油VS黄油：我们抹在吐司上的玩意儿是如何成为阶级斗争武器的？
2017年9月 作者为瑞典隆德大学英国文学高级讲师Ellen Turner

Margarine has seen its fortunes ebb and flow with the tide of popular opinion. But Unilever’s recent announcement that it’s dropping the margarine brands Flora and Stork marks a new low point for the spread. It seems consumers are demanding the authentic article instead – even McDonalds has allegedly switched to butter.

人造黄油的命运低潮期已然在望，而且一直随着公众舆论的变迁而起起落落。但联合利华公司最近宣布，准备放弃人造黄油品牌Flora和Stork，这标志着其传播（历史中）的新低点。看起来，消费者的需求正在转向真的货色，甚至连麦当劳，据说都已经转用黄油了。

Margarine (sometimes called “butterine”) was invented in 1869. It emerged in response to a prize offered by the French emperor Napoleon III to invent a convincing butter substitute to feed the growing population amid shortages of the real thing. It was a marvel of 19th-century food engineering.

人造黄油（有时候会被称为“人造奶油”）发明于1869年。法国皇帝拿破仑三世为了给陷于真货短缺中不断增多的人口提供足量的食物，为发明一种可信的黄油替代品提供了奖赏，它便应运而生了。它曾是十九世纪食品工程的奇迹。

The spread at one time epitomised what Rachel Laudan calls “culinary modernism”. Along with other processed and mass produced goods, margarine filled hungry stomachs with, relatively speaking, nutritious produce. And given its origins, margarine should be a symbol of democracy, innovation and progress.

这种传播还一度成为了瑞秋·劳丹口中“现代派烹饪”的代表。人造黄油和其他加工食品以及大规模制造的食品一道，用相对营养的产品填饱了饥饿的胃。而如果考察其起源，人造黄油应该是民主制、革新和进步的一种象征。
（译注：瑞秋．劳丹（Rachel Laudan）伦敦大学学院历史与科学哲学博士，美食史专家，著有《乐园的食物：夏威夷料理遗产探索》《帝国与料理》等）

But margarine has a shady reputation as can be seen from its etymological development. In addition to its usual definition as a noun, the Oxford English Dictionary charts how the word “margarine” came to be used as an adjective meaning “sham, bogus, counterfeit”. Though rationing during the World War II made margarine an everyday product in British households, regardless of class, it never managed to shake off its associations with “feelings of inferiority and poverty”. Margarine was, in the words of food historian Alysa Levene, “a vehicle for ‘class racism’.”

不过，人造黄油有着低劣的名声，这可以从其词源的发展变化中看出来。除了其作名词的常规定义以外，牛津英语词典绘制过图表，详细说明了“margarine（人造黄油）”这个词是如何转作了形容词之用，意指“虚假的、伪造的、假冒的”。虽然二战期间的配给制把人造黄油变成了英国家庭的一种日常食品，在不考虑阶级的情况下，这种情况也从未动摇过它和“低人一等乃至贫穷的感觉”之间的联系。用食品历史学家阿丽莎·列文的话来说，人造黄油曾是“传播‘阶级种族主义’的工具。”

A spread of low repute

臭名的传播

Poet Ezra Pound lamented the “margarine substitutes” that fed the public library hoards, while Bloomsbury group painter and critic Roger Fry used the put-down, “very good, pure, wholesome margarine” to describe the saccharine paintings of the enormously commercially successful Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (who was incidentally denounced by John Ruskin as the “worst painter of the 19th century”). The cultural and intellectual “elite” of interwar Britain used margarine to articulate the general feeling of contempt that they had for the “vulgar” taste of the masses.

诗人埃兹拉·庞德痛惜于公共图书馆的藏书中塞满了“人造黄油般的替代品”，而布卢姆茨伯里派的画家和批评家罗杰·弗莱伊则用“很好很纯有益健康的人造黄油”这样的羞辱之辞，来形容劳伦斯·阿尔玛-塔德玛爵士（他被约翰·罗斯金抨击为“十九世纪最烂的画家”）那些在商业上取得巨大成功的矫情画作。两次大战间的英国文化/知识“精英”用人造黄油这个词来明言其对民众“庸俗”品味的普遍鄙视。
（译注：布卢姆茨伯里派（Bloomsbury Group）由剑桥大学毕业生创办，是从1904年至第二次世界大战期间，以英国伦敦布卢姆茨伯里地区为活动中心的艺术家/学者团体；约翰·拉斯金（John Ruskin，1819～1900），英国艺术家、艺术评论家，维多利亚时代艺术趣味的代言人）

Margarine’s low repute is reflected by a startling number of prominent literary figures and works. And charting margarine’s (or butterine as it was still often called) literary appearances reveals much about class snobbery and elitism.

人造黄油的臭名，在数量惊人的文学形象和文学作品中均有所反映。而跟踪记录人造黄油（或人造奶油，因为这个词仍然很常用）的文学形象，深刻揭示出了阶级势利眼和精英主义。

One example from margarine’s formative years can be found in “the queen of bestsellers” Marie Corelli’s novel Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self (1890). Here, respect is apparently due to those who “know the difference between real butter and butterine”. Likewise in H. Rider Haggard’s 1884 debut adventure novel, Dawn,, a husband snubbed is compared to “butterine, inferior butter, you know, the counterfeit article”.

在“畅销书皇后”玛丽·科雷利的小说《阿达斯：死者的故事》（1890）中，可以找到人造黄油渐成气候的一个例子。在本书中，尊重显然被归给了那些“晓得真正的黄油和人造黄油区别”的人。而在亨利·莱特·哈葛德于1884年问世的冒险小说《黎明》中也是如此，受人冷落的丈夫被比作“人造黄油，劣等黄油，你懂的，就是那种假冒产品”。
（译注：亨利·莱特·哈葛德爵士，KBE（Sir Henry Rider Haggard，1856年－1925年），英国维多利亚时代广受欢迎的小说家，有《所罗门王的宝藏》等作品存世）
英国维多利亚时代受欢迎的小说家，以浪漫的爱情与惊险的冒险故事为题材，代表作为《所罗门王的宝藏》）

In his 1923 novel Kangaroo, DH Lawrence uses margarine to highlight the second-rate, in this case the antipodean capital, Sydney:

大卫·赫伯特·劳伦斯在他1923年的小说《袋鼠》中，用人造黄油来强调“二流”，在这里形容的是新西兰/澳大利亚的首都悉尼。
（译注：大卫·赫伯特·劳伦斯（1885-1930），英国小说家，有《查泰莱夫人的情人》等作品存世）

This London of the southern hemisphere was all, as it were, made in five minutes, a substitute for the real thing – as margarine is a substitute for butter.

“这座位于南半球的伦敦城可以说是在五分钟内建成的，是真货的一个替代品，就像是，人造黄油是黄油的一种替代品。”

George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), refers to the emasculating effect of margarine consumption. He writes that a man who consumes only bread and margarine is “not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs”. Orwell speaks of the “dirty in the grain look” which physically mars the consumer of the spread.

乔治·奥威尔在《巴黎伦敦落魄记》（1933）中，提及了人造黄油消费带来的阉割效应。他写道，一个只吃面包和人造黄油的男人“就不再是一个男人了，只是一个装着一些辅助器官的肚子而已”。奥威尔谈到了“有着谷物外观的肮脏”，这就破坏了这种消费的扩散。
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Later, in Orwell’s Coming up for Air (1939) troubled times are signified by margarine’s appearance, “a thing which in the old days [would] never have [been] allowed into the house”. Margarine is referred to similarly in James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses (1922):

后来，在奥威尔的长篇小说《上来透口气》（1939）中，用了人造黄油的外观来表示乱世，“一种在过去绝对不会允许进门的东西”。人造黄油在詹姆斯·乔伊斯的现代主义杰作《尤利西斯》（1922）中，所指代的也是类似的对象。
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Second rate

二流
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In a column penned by Evelyn Waugh for The Spectator in 1929, margarine represents a general post-war lack of good taste. During the war, writes Waugh, “[e]verything was a ‘substitute’ for something else”, the upshot being “a generation of whom nine hundred and fifty in every thousand are totally lacking in any sense of qualitative value” as a consequence of “being nurtured on margarine and ‘honey sugar’.” Such a diet, according to Waugh, makes them “turn instinctively to the second rate in art and life”.

在伊芙琳·沃夫于1929年为《旁观者》周刊撰写的一则专栏文章中，人造黄油代表了一战后普遍缺乏高品味的情况。在战争期间，沃夫写道，“一切都是其他东西的一种‘替代品’”，这样带来的结果就是“一代人中，每一千个人中就有九百五十个完全缺乏品质价值意识”，而这是“用人造黄油和‘蜜糖’喂大”的一种后果，根据沃夫的说法，这样的饮食习惯，使得他们“在艺术和人生层面本能地转向了二流”。

Tellingly, margarine features as a central plot device in two detective stories centring on themes of class, detection, and fakery: Arthur Morrison’s The Stolen Blenkinsop (1908) and Dorothy L Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise (1933).

而显著的是，人造黄油在两部聚焦于阶级、侦查和伪造的侦探小说中都充当了核心情节的工具，起到了重要作用：亚瑟·莫里森的《被盗的布伦金索普》（1908）和桃乐丝·赛耶斯的《杀人广告》（1933）。
（译注：《杀人广告》(Murder Must Advertise)、《丧钟九下》(The Nine Tailors)和《俗丽之夜》(Gaudy Night)是桃乐丝·赛耶斯的自传三部曲）

In the latter, Lord Peter Wimsey, disguised as a copywriter at an advertising agency, finds himself producing copy for a brand of margarine. Margarine is in need of advertisement because it is seen as a second-rate product, which the general public needs convincing to buy. Butter, on the other hand, sells itself:

在后者中，彼得·温西勋爵在一家广告公司中伪装成了一名广告文字撰稿人，为某品牌的人造黄油创作文稿。人造黄油是需要做广告的，因为它被视为一种二流产品，公众需要被说服才肯去买。而另一方面，黄油不需要任何推销就能卖出去。

You don’t need an argument for buying butter. It’s a natural, human instinct.

购买黄油是不需要你去论证的。那是一种很自然的人类本能。
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Margarine functions as an extended metaphor for the tawdry world of fakes and counterfeits. At the same time that Sayers’ novel pokes fun at the consumer products of modernity, it dishes out scorn at the snootiness which ranks butter eaters as superior to those who choose margarine.

人造黄油的作用，便是扩展隐喻了这个俗艳世界的假货和仿冒品。与此同时，赛耶斯的小说嘲弄了现代消费品，对于这种把吃黄油的人凌驾于那些选择人造黄油的人的傲慢自大，她也表示了不屑。
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Margarine stands for the novel and the innovative. It stands for technology and progress. But margarine also embodies anxieties about the prence of mass culture and the fear surrounding the dissolution of boundaries between the high and the low, the real and the fake. Margarine is so threatening a symbol as it represents the potential contamination of society with what the early 20th-century elites might have seen as infectious mediocrity.

人造黄油代表的就是这种新奇和革新。它代表的是技术和进步。但经由人造黄油，也表达出了对大众文化盛行的焦虑，还有对于高和低、真与假之间界限消解的恐惧。人造黄油也是极富威胁的一个象征物，因为它代表了对社会的潜在玷污，二十世纪初的精英们可能会将其看成会传染的平庸。