Day 211 – No Marmite

Infamously, “you either love it or you hate it”. Or you simply can’t buy it.

I was shopping yesterday and I couldn’t find any Marmite. Four different shops comprehensively failed to yield a single jar of popular/unpopular spread between them.
And you can’t just replace it with Bovril, can you? Some of them might be vegetarians.

These things sometimes happen. I remember that time not so long ago that the Western Cape ran out of carbon dioxide (but how?!?!) and couldn’t make Coca-Cola. But Marmite doesn’t need See Oh Too for its manufacture, so what’s gone wrong here?

Well, I think I have worked out the answer.

Remember the whole Lockdown thing* when we weren’t allowed to buy alcohol and were all rationing whatever we had left? Well, because we weren’t allowed to buy beer, breweries couldn’t sell beer and so some breweries stopped brewing beer.

And the yeast that is produced as a by-product of all the brewing of the beer is exactly the ingredient that the Marmite people need to make Marmite. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so bizarre that we’re out of Marmite in SA. No beer, no yeast, no Marmite.

And we can all blame Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

You either love her or you hate her.

 

* we must be on Day 211 or something by now…