'stache #47 - the vegemite moustache

Misoneists step aside as porkmoustache boldly marches into the modern age of maybe-they-shouldn't-be-edible moustaches, the short American century. The story begins in 1912 when Clarence Birdseye, the first of many great Americans from Brooklyn, was on a fur-trading expedition in Labrador, in the Northwest Territory, where it was so damn cold, fish froze instantly after being caught and retrieved from the icy waters. (It should be noted that Birdseye was a man of many moustaches. "I have more 'staches than the law allows", he once explained. "Some are sissy. Some have hair on their chest.") From there it only took him 12 years to develop the flash-freezing process and American culinary history flew into mechanization and processing, from the meaty jungles of Chicago to a future of soylent green. So this series celebrates moustaches comestible of food items that wouldn't have really been food items without modernity.

Enter the vegemite 'stache, invented in 1923, a beefy, savoury, malt-based, spreadable 'stache. Its origins are in Australia, which should be noted is the only nation which began as an island penal colony, and it is its long term isolation (the island broke away from Gondwana approx 140 million years ago and 90% of Aussie wildlife is endemic) that makes this moustache unique. But the 'stache traveled the world quickly with the high numbers of Australian travelers and expats, wooing dumb American college kids with their funny accents, saying, "Vegemite, Australian for Moustache."

The vegemite moustache may be worn with or without packaging.

Harry Truman and SPAM, A Porkmoustache Historical Interlude

President Harry S Truman, best remembered for his folksy phrases like “The spam stops here” and “If you can’t stand the heat, you better wear a canned meat,” popularized the spam ‘stache in the final months of World War II, when he stretched the square slab of fleshy pink pork across his own lips in solidarity with the boys at the front who, far from home, were resigned to suffer the indignities of lining their mouths with canned meat byproducts. First a fad among navy men at Pearl Harbor, the spam stache sensation set sail around the globe, and quickly became an enduring symbol of soldierly sacrifice. Truman, the son of a Missouri farmer and livestock dealer, had grown up raising the hogs he 'stached, and was thus surprised to discover his predilection for the strange sweet “meat” that dangled akimbo above his lips. As a haberdasher in his early years, and later in the army, he had sworn that the finest mouthpiece was simply a lipline of bacon, and yet the odd odor of Shoulder of Pork and hAM wafting beneath his nose enticed Truman to revisit his beliefs about the kind of moustache a hardworking American might wear.


Following the war, he busied himself writing up a doctrine about the need to contain communist duck 'staches and advocating the promotion of democratic lip-dos around the world. General MacArthur is credited with the military dictum, "In facial hair, there is no substitute for ham," which is why Truman ultimately had to fire him.


Truman continued to wear spam long after it lost sway with the public in the postwar years, though it enjoyed a brief resurgence on the lips of patriots and paranoids during the red-baiting hearings of the 1950s.

The SPAM moustache is now generally only worn in Guam and Hawaii, where it was recently spotted in a bastardized sushi roll 'stache.