2 Texans Down Under

Kristi and I put some relatives and friends in potentially uncomfortable positions this past holiday by giving each of them a paperback copy of my just-published book and small glass bottle with a yellow top, a jar of Vegemite.

With the givers present, recipients tend to be under pressure to express some degree of appreciation for what they’ve been given, lest feelings be hurt. In an ideal world, as the wrapping paper falls away, the recipient expresses unrestrained joy, marked by laughter and perhaps even tears. In the real world, “Oh, how nice” usually suffices.

My book, Moving to Australia: Two Texans Down Under, didn’t present much of a problem to those with whom we exchange Christmas gifts since one could admire the cover and put it aside for later reading (or consignment to a shelf or recycle bin) in the absence of the givers.

The little jar of “concentrated yeast extract,” though, seemed to require immediate opening, sniffing, and sampling.

I told people that even though I am now a Vegemite fan, I didn’t like this thick paste to which Australians are often addicted when I first tried it. I agree with a columnist for “The Weekend Australian Magazine,” who wrote for the January 5-6 issue that there is “something outlandish about it, from its faintly pharmaceutical jar to its trademark toxic-wastefulness of texture, color and aroma.”

But I also agree with Susan Maushart, a New Yorker who is now an Australian citizen, that Vegemite “has a way of sneaking up on a migrant.” It snuck up on me. Now I love it as a thin layer on buttered toast.

We suggested that way of sampling Vegemite when the gift-openings were over. One couple’s reaction was to politely give the little bottle back to us with only a small divot disturbing the smooth, brown surface of Kraft’s most famous Aussie product.

Some reactions were along the lines of “People eat this?” and there were no spontaneous outbursts of joy. Out of about 10 samplings, though, four produced positive reactions ranging all the way up to “not bad.”

Two of those positive reactions, we must admit, came from Ted and Marilyn, Kristi’s dad and step-mother, both of whom are biased toward admiration (justifiable, I think) for nearly everything attributable to Ted’s daughter. And another was from Kristi’s step-father, Chuck, to whom we gave a larger bottle of Vegemite because he’d expressed appreciation for it while he and her mother, Ann, were visiting in Brisbane last year. He’s a genuine convert.

Maybe that level of acceptance is about as much as one could hope for from a gift that is an acquired taste like, as Susan Maushart says, “fugu, or Hillary Clinton.” Maybe we’d have done a more successful sales pitch if we’d known what Maushart points out in her column, that Vegemite’s appeal is based on a fifth kind of taste recognized by our senses.

A professor at Tokyo Imperial University began experiments in 1907 involving a taste common to Japanese food that is not part of the four we normally identify: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. He found it in asparagus, tomatoes, cheese, and meat as well as one kind of seaweed that is used in a popular Japanese soup.

These foods, he said, have a fifth kind of taste, which he named “umami,” and he eventually identified its source: glutamate. Later he produced a product that introduces umami to other foods (and gives some people headaches) monosodium glutamate.

At a seminar sponsored by the University of Adelaide in October of last year, Vegemite was acknowledged as one of the most umami-rich of the world’s condiments.

And, though newly recognized as a separate taste, umami is not new to humans. It’s common in breast milk. The milk of cows has only one tenth as much.

So to our friends and relatives who may still be figuring out what to do with the unorthodox gifts they received from us, I say give that vitamin-B rich brown stuff another try. Umami is good.

And read my book. If for no other reason, read it as a reward to me for resisting all the puns that came to my mind as I wrote these last paragraphs.

– Bob