Marmite began as brewery leftovers and ended up curing anaemia in Bombay
The dark, salty spread Britons either adore or loathe is made from spent yeast skimmed off beer brewing. In the 1930s a haematologist used it to treat anaemia among Bombay mill workers, a discovery that eventually pointed her to folic acid.
In the late 19th century the German chemist Justus von Liebig found that brewer's yeast could be concentrated, bottled and eaten, but early commercial versions flopped. Success came in 1902, when the Marmite Food Extract Company set up in Burton upon Trent, taking its yeast from Bass Brewery. British beer yeast behaved differently from continental strains, so the firm had to devise new machinery before it had a product worth selling. A second factory followed in London by 1907.
Vitamins made its name. Once they were discovered around 1912, the spread's rich load of B vitamins mattered, especially with beriberi, a thiamine deficiency, common during the First World War, when British soldiers found it in their rations. Lucy Wills's anaemia work followed in the 1930s, and in 1934 and 1935 volunteers in British Ceylon handed it out against malnutrition during a malaria epidemic. In the Second World War it served as a vitamin supplement for German prisoners held in Britain.
Making it is a controlled self-destruction. Adding salt to a yeast suspension draws water out of the cells until they shrivel and digest themselves, a process called autolysis; heat finishes the job and the tough cell walls are sieved away. What remains is packed with glutamate, 1960 mg per 100 g, the source of its savoury punch. Vitamin B12, which yeast lacks, is added, making it useful for vegans. People on certain antidepressants called MAO inhibitors should avoid it because of its tyramine.
The jar's picture shows a marmite, a French covered cooking pot, and the spread came in earthenware until the 1920s. Its Love it or Hate it campaign, launched in October 1996, gave English the Marmite effect for anything divisive. Australia's Vegemite, created in the 1920s by Cyril Callister when wartime shortages cut off supplies, borrowed its name. Unilever has owned the brand since a 2000 merger, and in 2011 British newspapers wrongly reported a Danish ban when the importer simply lacked a licence.
Source: Marmite
