Judge rejects prisoner’s challenge to Vegemite ban

A prisoner on Monday lost his challenge to an Australian state’s ban on inmates eating Vegemite after he argued in court that withholding the polarizing yeast-based spread breached his human right to “enjoy his culture as an Australian.”

Andre McKechnie, 55, who is serving a life sentence for murder, last year took his battle for the salty, sticky, black-brown byproduct of brewing beer to the Supreme Court of Victoria.

He had argued being refused Vegemite denied him his right under the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act to “enjoy his culture as an Australian in the community with other persons of Australian background,” court documents showed.

A piece of toast is spread with Vegemite in Sydney on Nov. 17 last year.

Photo: AP

Australian Justice Claire Harris accepted prison authorities’ refusal to allow McKechnie Vegemite “limited his cultural rights” under the charter.

However, she found the ban was justified in meeting authorities’ goals of removing illicit drugs and alcohol from the prison system.

“The limitation on Mr. McKechnie’s ability to enjoy Vegemite in community with other persons of Australian background is primarily that he is a prisoner,” Harris wrote in her 47-page verdict.

Prison officials testified at a trial in July that Vegemite had been banned throughout the state’s 12 prisons for the past 20 years, because it could potentially impair sniffer dogs’ ability to detect narcotics and could be used to brew alcohol because of its yeast content.

McKechnie, who represented himself in court by video link from maximum security Barwon Prison west of Melbourne, argued that the fact that neighboring New South Wales state did not ban Vegemite from its prisons was evidence that there were “less restrictive means reasonably available” to achieve such drug and alcohol outcomes.

Most Australians revere Vegemite as an unfairly maligned culinary icon, and more than 80 percent of Australian households are estimated to have a jar in their pantries. Vegemite is typically considered an acquired taste at best by those who were not raised on it.

The last US president to visit Australia, Barack Obama, once said: “It’s horrible.”