World's Rarest And Most Expensive Stamp To Be Shown At Stampex 2023

Quote:
French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès had patented "oleomargarine" (which replaced expensive milkfat with much cheaper beef lard) as a cheap butter alternative in 1869, and Americans were soon taking it a step further, using lard not just in the production of butter but also for the production of cheese—this "imitation cheese" became known as filled cheese. Dairies in New York began making filled cheese by 1871, and factories around the country caught on and started churning it out en masse.

The outcry against this false cheese was vehemently negative. Filled cheese was surely made from the fat of sick and dirty livestock—the San Francisco Call claimed that "of course it is only to be expected that the more unscrupulous class of manufacturers will use rancid lard and suet from diseased beeves," and the New York Times reported how "a great deal of the lard used in the manufacture of this imitation cheese was from diseased hogs." And even more than the filled cheese itself was its impact on trade. One witness testified before the New York Assembly Committee on Public Health in 1881 that filled cheese was "destroying all confidence in our cheese, and ruin[ing] the magnificent export trade which it has taken so much time and labor to build up."

A big problem with the filled cheese–haters' strategy was that it looked and tasted so much like the real deal. Experts at the Assembly Committee called it "a very successful imitation, and very deceptive," and tales were spun of unsuspecting cheesemongers selling filled cheese and believing it to be the genuine article. An 1882 piece on "Imitation Cheese" from the British journal Nature argued that, "indeed, so excellent is the imitation, that competent judges in the City and elsewhere… [agreed] that unless they had been told, they could not distinguish the oleomargarine cheese from ordinary American cheese."

Efforts to come up with a law requiring filled cheese to be labeled as such were slow to gain momentum, and by the time Congress passed legislation in 1896, the damage had been done. English consumers, told that this was a fake, gross cheese (even though it tasted pretty much the same as "real" cheese), refused to buy the stuff. England turned to Australia and New Zealand for its dairy needs, and an American cheese export high of 148 million pounds in 1881 dwindled to barely a trickle by the dawn of the twentieth century.

So there we have it, gang—unless consumers know about it, they will happily buy and eat anything that looks and tastes good. But as soon as the food item is revealed (or is painted as) a gnarly adulteration of true cheese that is made from diseased pig fat, people are going to start caring.

Quote:
It has not had its own shrine at Gibbon's for decades with the added hucksterism of fractional ownership along with its own PR firm and agent.

Quote:
That does not mean SG is advertising a Banksy