Poll: How Hungover Would You Need to Be to Try a Vegemite Cure?
Poll: How Hungover Would You Need to Be to Try a Vegemite Cure?
Vegemite in Australia
“Would you like me to get you something?” my colleague asked, her concern almost masking her amusement. I groaned, barely lifting my head off the desk. ‘You need coffee and a toastie,” she decided. I was in no state to protest, having made the mistake of overindulging the evening before. It was an act I later learned that, as a graduate lawyer, was unofficially overlooked only if you somehow slumped yourself back into your chair the following morning.
A brown paper bag was dropped onto my desk a few moments later with a gentle thump, coffee cup in tow. I cradled the coffee gratefully with both hands, gently slurping the contents.
With my curiosity eventually outweighing my desire to remain parallel to the table, I poked my nose into the bag. I pulled out the toasted Turkish bread and took a bite. It was exactly what I needed. The salty bitterness and umami of the Vegemite cutting through the buttery crunch of the toast. How could something that had only ever previously registered on my culinary radar as a gimmick food for international visitors suddenly be so appropriate and… right?
Vegemite divides people. You either hate it or love it; there is rarely an indifference to that dark, thick spread. At university, local students encouraged and baited their international counterparts to try a spoonful of the paste straight from the jar. “Yeah go on, it’s how we all do it, I’ll show you,” years of childhood consumption giving them the acquired taste required to pull off such a daring act. We were setting them up for failure, laughing as they inevitably grimaced at the overload of saltiness. Aside from being typically Australian in humor, it only built the folklore of Vegemite with outsiders (scarred by their experience) remaining bewildered as to what Australians could see in the black mush.
Though similarities in taste and appearance can be drawn with British brands Marmite and Bovril, Vegemite has sealed itself as the quintessential Aussie icon. Its cultural significance was compounded by the infamous Australian band Men at Work’s song “Down Under,” in which the narrator—upon chancing a meeting with a man from Brussels—enquires diplomatically “do you speak-a my language?” only for the Belgian to smile and give him a Vegemite sandwich.
I chuckled to myself in reminiscence as I polished off the toast. Finally, feeling like something resembling a human again, I swept up the crumbs and began the daily grind.