Every so often, running a Marmite site gets me a phone call I would never have predicted. This was one of the better ones. Back in 2009, the British Forces Broadcasting Service got in touch and asked if I would talk about Marmite on the radio.
If you have not come across it, BFBS broadcasts to British forces and their families all over the world, wherever they happen to be posted, which is usually a fair way from the nearest jar. Lynn Duffus did the interview, and we covered a lot of ground.
She asked, sensibly, whether I worked for Marmite. I do not. I write software and websites, and, as I admitted on air, I also teach dancing, which threw the conversation off course for a moment. The honest reason the site exists is that I turned into a Marmite lover while working in Boston, surrounded by American colleagues who had no idea what the stuff was and nowhere to look it up. So I built somewhere.
Then the usual primer, for the uninitiated: Marmite is a yeast extract, the exact recipe a Coca-Cola-grade secret, made from a by-product of the brewing industry, which is why it comes from Burton-on-Trent, where the breweries are. It tastes meaty, and works a treat stirred into a chilli or a gravy, yet it is completely vegetarian. I mentioned, to a few raised eyebrows, that Marmite was even being put forward as suitable for Muslim diets.
The good bit, as ever, was the reader stories. Most of what people send me is far too embarrassing to read out on forces radio. The one I could repeat was the pregnant woman who craved Marmite on bananas, which I could vouch for, because my partner was pregnant at the time and we had three jars on the go. We also got onto Paddington, and the gloriously daft run of ads where the bear swaps his marmalade for Marmite, hell having presumably frozen over.
My favourite tangent was the Derbyshire "Marmite dumping" scandal that had been in the news. A village was up in arms about a horrible smell, and the culprit turned out to be a farmer spreading the Marmite by-product on his field. It is basically water and spent yeast, an excellent natural fertiliser that the local farms normally plough straight into the soil. This chap had simply left it sitting on top in the sun, hence the pong. Completely legal, so everyone could calm down.
As for how I eat it: the thing I have never bettered, picked up in the States, is a fresh bagel, toasted, buttered, a scrape of Marmite, and whipped Philadelphia over the top. And my advice to anyone who is sure Marmite is the food of Satan but has never actually tried it? Try it. Just spread it thinly. The last thing you want is a Marmite overdose.
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