Weetabix - An Australian Original by Tom

Australian not Irish



Last year we got hooked on a very funny Irish television series entitled "Moone Boy".  Chris O'Dowd is the imaginary friend of Martin Moone, and, as it turns out, it is a bit of retrospective of O'Dowd's childhood experiences.  One of the episodes involves getting a new bicycle from collecting many boxtops from a cereal named "Reddibix".  Martin's sisters cringe at the thought of having to eat so much of this stuff.  We wondered why.  So we went on the hunt for the cereal.  No such cereal exists in real life, but Weetabix does!

 

Weetabix is the British version of the original Australian cereal Weet-Bix.  Clever rebranding.  We can thank Australian Bennison Osborne for inventing this high fiber cereal.  He developed it in the mid-1920s, but through a series of circumstances it ended up being manufactured in England in the 1932. 

 

English food until the last thirty years or so has not been known for its culinary excellence.  Weetabix fits right into that stereotype, and perhaps even helped to promote it.

It comes in the package nicely bundled as a biscuit.  It looks like a hybrid of plywood and sawdust.  But then the magic happens.  As soon as milk touches it, it turns into a soggy mess.  It is rather hard to describe the taste of Weetabix once in this state.  Obviously because the main ingredient is wheat, it does have this taste.  Although I have never eaten Cream-of-Wheat cold, I imagine this would be a fairly accurate description of its taste.

 

So there you have it.  An Australian invention that found its way to England and eventually into our kitchen pantry.  It may be there for a while.

 

  --Tom