What Australian’s Love and American’s Hate

It has the consistency of peanut butter, the color of tar and a smell that should not be described among gentile company.

Dr. Cyril Callister, a food technologist, invented Vegemite when given the task to find a use for the used yeast being dumped into the trash by beer breweries in the early 1920s. His process extracted the large amount of B vitamins from the yeast and combined it with celery, onions and salt to produce the sticky spread that easily provides your daily requirement of B vitamins and salt.

Many Australians believe the only way to eat it, is to cover every square millimeter of a piece of bread, muffin or crumpet with a thick coating of the stuff.

I formed my negative opinion of Vegemite 41 years ago, so decided I should give it another chance. My updated opinion is:

We were recently told that right way to enjoy Vegemite is to use a very thin layer of the spread – so you can just barely tell it’s there.

My reaction:

Still Yuck

You can find Vegemite in many containers on the grocery store shelves – jars of many sizes, tubes and small boxes packaged with crackers – much like cheese and cracker containers you see in the US.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The big challenge today is that young Australians do not embrace Vegemite in the same way as their parents. One solution has been to produce a mixture of cheese and Vegemite.

As for me, I’ll pass on Vegemite by any name, in any container or in any mixture.

Follow up on our solstice card – The last photograph in our solstice card showed the top of a Christmas tree and the crescent Moon – photographed just after sunset.

This makes the Moon a waxing crescent, a few days before it is seen as a first quarter and a little over a week away from the Full Moon that produced the lunar eclipse many people observed. In the Northern Hemisphere the crescent would be seen with the lit part to the right rather than the left. If you could see the individual features on the Moon, you also find the Moon appears to be upside-down compared to what is seen in the Northern Hemisphere.