Barthes’s essay ‘Operation Margarine’

In his essay ‘Operation Margarine’, Roland Barthes presents to us an

analysis of the common household commodities – margarine. Many people are
used to use margarine as a substitute for butter; but even though margarine still
remains a substitute for butter, it reached a level enough to rival butter itself. As
Barthes says, people are in want of the real butter, but they decide to buy the
margarine, most of the times because it is cheaper. People eventually learn to
accept the margarine instead of butter. Ironically though, people know it is not
butter, but they accept it nonetheless, in the same manner Barthes said that social
institutions operate by showing the people its failings.
Barthes presents a few institutions that operate by showing its failings or bad
sides. For example, he said that the Army ‘show without disguise its chiefs as
martinets, its discipline as narrow-minded and unfair, into this stupid tyranny
immerse an average human being, fallible but likeable, the archetype of the
spectator.’ But even though they present us ‘the bad side’, they also turn over in
the last moment and show us this image of a triumphant Army with flags flying.
He also talks about the Church saying that it does not ‘hide none of the weaknesses
of the faith’.
What I understand from ‘Operation Margarine’ is that Barthes is trying to
show us how people can live accepting bad sides of the institutions as easily as
they accept the fact that they are buying margarine just because it is cheaper, even
though they know it is not necessarily healthy like the butter.