Baked beans on Weetabix? We can do better than that

COMMENT

It's enough to make you choke on your morning cuppa. In Britain this week, Weetabix posted a Tweet that showed two of their dry bricks of wheaty cereal covered in Heinz baked beans. Ewww, gross. (Clearly I do not know how to spell ewww, but I know gross when I see it).

"Why should bread have all the fun when there's Weetabix?" they asked a population languishing at home in all the misery of a national lockdown. Never mind that it was posted by Francesca of Marketing as an obvious play for viral status – it worked. You'd think they'd be avoiding anything viral, but what else do the Brits and the Scots have to do in these troubled times but make funny comments on their smart phones?

The truth is the English would put baked beans on anything that stood still long enough, and the Scots would then deep-fry it. In my years as cookery editor of The Times in London, I saw plenty of full English breakfasts and deep-fried Mars Bars, but never did they put baked beans on a breakfast cereal. Perhaps those were more innocent times.

And it's our fault, after all. Weet-Bix began here in Australia, appearing on our kitchen tables in 1928 with the suggestion to douse them in heated milk to make them edible. They were then nicked by the British, who promptly stuck an 'a' in the middle of the name.

Our hearts go out to our Blighty cousins stuck at home. Perhaps we should be sending care parcels of avocado and toast to help prevent this breakfast-time abuse. Because there's no way the good people of this land of milk and honey would do anything like that, right? Oh dear. It seems we have been raising the stakes in breakfast table grossness for some time now.

We all know people who spread their Weet-Bix and Vita Brits with Vegemite – they're the same people who spread them with marmalade for dessert. In the scheme of things, that's pretty small potatoes. Although one otherwise respectable Australian online recipe source (okay, it's taste.com.au) does have a recipe for a smoothie that whizzes Weet-Bix, peanut butter, orange and banana into something, um, drinkable.

Now Weet-Bix Australia has entered the fray with the provocative hashtag #howdoyoudoyours. An image on their Instagram account – which should come with a warning – replaces the sausage in a Bunnings-style sausage sizzle white-bread sandwich with two lightly grilled Weet-Bix topped with an artful stripe of tomato sauce. How do you spell eewww again?

"When we saw Weetabix having all the fun in the UK, we just couldn't resist jumping in with an even better Australian version," says Sharon Green, senior brand manager at parent company Sanitarium. "We reckoned tomato sauce would be the perfect pairing with our Aussie icon".

Followers were quick to call the grilled Weet-Bix sandwich "disgusting", with one commenter saying, "I am thinking of calling the police".

Yet among the 1500 comments there was this: "That's my son's perfect meal". And these: "If they aren't crushed and mixed with rum and condensed milk, they're not worth eating", "Jam and cream please" and "Peanut butter and sliced banana".

But the last word (please!) should go to the person who wanted to know if it came with fried onions. Of course it should.