Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where my editor David Swanson and I eat our way through Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week, an Aussie icon: Vegemite.

Vegemite is so beloved in Australia that in 2025, a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder sued the state of Victoria for restoration of the spread to his diet. The yeast-based condiment is so pungent that it had been banned from Victorian prisons since 2006, with officials contending that its odor confounded drug-sniffing dogs, enabling contraband to be smuggled inside the signature yellow jars. With colorful ads, generations of Australian children have been raised as “happy little Vegemites,” enjoying the spread on toast—the typical Vegemite sandwich—or even straight from the jar. The National Museum of Australia includes an unopened jar of Vegemite in its “Defining Symbols of Australia” collection.

But Vegemite—perhaps appropriately—is Australian with deep and traceable British roots. It’s impossible to discuss Vegemite in any of its hypnotizing black depths without discussing its direct forebear—the slacker-textured, stronger-tasting British condiment known as Marmite, which is also made from brewer’s yeast, a byproduct of the beer industry.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is Taskmaster, in which panels of British comedians are coerced into doing various silly tasks. In Series 5, one memorable challenge was “Make Marmite.” As the contestants pondered how to create various brown sludges, Yorkshire comedian Bob Mortimer pondered the best tactics for reproduce this infamous British spread. "Maybe put a cow in a room until it withers, and then you can mop up the residue," he suggested. (Later he explained that Marmite tastes like “salt, and the memories of meat.” He won the task.)

Mortimer was right in that Marmite tastes disconcertingly beefy, although it contains no beef. In fact, it contains no meat of any kind. The quick and dirty history of the spread is as follows: Nineteenth-century German chemist Justus von Liebig, a pioneer in fertilizer, mirror-making, and the eponymous Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company, had discovered that brewer’s yeast could be condensed down to form a dense, tarry, disconcertingly meconium-like extract—and that the resulting product held the elusive umami richness of beef. In 1902, the Marmite Food Company was founded in a disused malthouse in Burton-on-Trent, England, near the Bass Brewery and other convenient local sources of brewer’s yeast. The name “Marmite” derives from a pot-bellied French cookpot of the same name, which lent its distinctive shape to the company’s signature earthenware, then glass, jars.

Long a byproduct of the beer industry, brewer’s yeast is also, as was discovered in the decades after the Marmite Food Company was founded, extremely rich in vitamins. It’s a kind of nutrient superpaste, particularly full of B vitamins like niacin, folic acid, and riboflavin. (It’s worth noting that the guy who coined the term “vitamin” in 1912 was the excellently named Polish chemist Casimir Funk, which sounds like a band with some extremely solid jams about pierogi.) If the diets of humans are deficient in the B vitamins Marmite is rich in—niacin in particular—the human body can do some very nasty things. Specifically, niacin deficiency causes the disease known as pellagra, whose symptoms begin with the characteristic “butterfly rash” that lends the disease its name; pellagra can lead to swelling of the tongue, weakness, ataxia (uncoordinated movements), insomnia, agitation, and eventually dementia and death through a weakened heart (cardiomyopathy). It was frequently suffered by starving prisoners in Soviet gulags, and persists among the world’s most impoverished populations. Marmite also contains large amounts of iron and folate, the latter of which is crucial for pregnant women in particular—and the absence of which can cause a horrific bone marrow disorder known as megoblastic anemia. The fact that Marmite, a nutritional powerhouse, was developed just before vitamins were beginning to be isolated and understood—more than twenty years before Vitamin C was discovered to be the cure for scurvy—was a happy accident of sorts.

Marmite was initially marketed as a health food, and a boon for vegetarians craving savory flavors. But the spread, while divisive from the start—its slogan is still “Love It or Hate It”—gained traction not just in Britain, but throughout the then-vast British Empire. In 1908, Sanitarium Health Foods began producing Marmite in Australia, with factories in Christchurch and Cooronbong. But the real boost to Marmite, its journey to ubiquity, came in a moment of worldwide calamity.

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Marmite’s nutritive properties were discovered just in time for Britain to go to war, and the spread began its journey to imperial ubiquity as a crucial part of British soldiers’ rations; among its other less savory features, it’s cheap, and very slow to spoil. Given that these poor men were suffering from trench foot, trench mouth, trench fever, plus stuff like typhus and scabies, giving them tons of Marmite seems unnecessarily cruel. But privation is ever the mother of nostalgia: from the Western front to the home front, Marmite soon became a staple at British tables.

But World War I was truly a World War, and ANZAC troops (the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) played a crucial role in defense of the British Empire, alongside troops from India, Canada, the West Indies and African colonies. World War I is remembered with consistent and moving solemnity in Australia; it was the first occasion in which Australians en masse were called upon to lose their lives on foreign shores in defense of a faraway motherland, although far smaller contingents of Australian troops had fought for England during the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion.

ANZAC Day, which commemorates lost and fallen military personnel in Australia and New Zealand, was originally designated to honor the many thousands of Australians lost during the doomed Gallipoli campaign—an eight-month-long, protracted amphibious siege by ANZAC troops against the forces of a young and aggressive Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, founder of the modern state of Turkey, in the Ottoman Dardanelles. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill threw legions of British and French soldiers, as well as untested Australians and New Zealanders, against a foe that had the high ground from the first and knew it well. “It was a magnificent spectacle to see those thousands of men rushing through the hail of Death as though it was some big game,” wrote Australian signaller Ellis Silas of his first landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. By the following day he wrote in despair: “Our signallers have been nearly all wiped out—I suppose I'll get my lead pill next.”

Ellis survived, but some sixty thousand Allied troops—of whom nearly half were Australian—were killed outright in the months of protracted and futile siege warfare that signaled the campaign. Turkish snipers commanded the beaches; the act of going for water, Ellis writes, was an exercise in knowingly courting death of one kind to stave off another. “One must drink, even if the price be death,” he wrote. 

One of the things the returning ANZAC troops brought home—in addition to trauma, loss, casualties and a sense of national pride—was a hunger for Marmite. Rubbing trench elbows with British troops during prolonged campaigns, the salty spread gained an attentive following among soldiers for whom long and excruciating periods of waiting for violence in oppressive conditions was punctuated by an obsession with food. Spoiled and rotting rations, the occasional looted feast, and thin, improvised stews of hardtack and stringy canned beef were improved by the dense, umami flavor of Marmite. “The unofficial line was that a tin of stew with a teaspoon of Marmite stirred in tastes like a real dinner instead of a punishment,” wrote self-described Marmite superfan and amateur historian Seamus Waldron, on his astonishingly thoroughgoing site ILoveMarmite.co.uk. 

But after World War I, Britain’s economy was in shambles—and so were Marmite exports. Disruptions to shipping throughout the war made for Marmite scarcity in Australasia, and a shattered economy, rising unemployment, and depressed trade rendered supplies so unreliable that restaurants took out newspaper ads to announce Marmite availability in Australia. Into this gap stepped a handsome chemist named Cyril Callister, who transferred smoothly from wartime munitions chemistry to creating Vegemite (and later processed cheese).

In 1923, Fred Walker & Co, a Melbourne-based company, began marketing Callister’s Australasian Marmite alternative, enriched, as the name indicates, with celery and onion extracts. By the 1930s, Vegemite was a hit on Australian tables. It became a true Australasian staple during World War II, when Marmite was near-totally unavailable due to the shipping disruptions caused by global upheaval. Australia’s isolation, in this sense, was the mother of necessity, as its own, proudly beloved tarry black paste spread throughout the country and over countless slices of toast. 

Having taste-tested and compared the mother spread (Marmite) and its Australian offspring, I find myself coming down hard on the side of the Aussies. Vegemite spreads far more easily—it has the consistency of a smooth peanut butter—and the vegetal extracts lend it a more robust flavor. Marmite’s molasses-like slackness means it is best served, as one Brit told me, in “lashings over butter on a crumpet,” but to me the briny, tarry viscosity paired odiously with the richness of dairy. By comparison I ate a few spoonfuls of Vegemite whole—to no ill effect, and presumably thereby enriched my overall B vitamin level. Throughout the process of obtaining, tasting and comparing Marmite and Vegemite the idea of a savory, umami-packed spread grew on me, and though I am no longer a lad, I would be a happy little Vegemite with a sandwich like that in my lunchbox.

Developed at the turn of the century and thrown into the spotlight by the theater of war, Marmite and Vegemite brought the industrial refuse of brewer’s yeast into a new era of vitamins. It’s possible that the vital niacin, protein, riboflavin, et al, contained in Marmite helped sustain gentleman officers such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Owen Jones, Percy Wyndham Lewis, and Edmund Blunden in their various prosaic and poetic efforts to document the horrors of war. Less waifishly aristocratic, but no less powerfully lettered, are their ANZAC counterparts, from Leon Gellert’s staggering Songs of a Campaign to the blackly tragicomic The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederick Manning (a novel in which three soldiers, unpacking a crate of rations sent from home, discover that an enormous sandwich loaf filling much of the box has been hollowed out and stuffed with tiny bottles of Scotch—leaving only dry crumb to accompany the canned chicken sent with it.)

For this I must commend Marmite: via the roundabout route of reading a lot of these books, I must have vicariously consumed a lot of it, and the black Vegemite of postwar Australasian ennui. My appetite for memoirs of the Great War is endless; my appetite for brewer’s yeast spreads of any variety is significantly less so. Both are, however, dark and bitter, and, in their own ways, changed the world.