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For a six-ingredient food product, it's taken on a life of its own. Spam — the square-shaped mash-up of pork, water, salt, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrate — recently celebrated its 77th anniversary of being alternately maligned, celebrated, musicalized, or the subject of urban legend (one particularly pervasive myth insists that its name is actually an acronym for "Scientifically Processed Animal Matter"). And despite today's more locavore approach to food and some unkind memories from soldiers who were served Spam during WWII, Spam has entered its third quarter-century on the rise. More than eight billion cans have been sold since the Hormel Corporation unleashed the product in 1937; it's currently available in 44 countries throughout the world.
Spam's ability to straddle highbrow and lowbrow is apparently in its DNA: Since its early days, even Jay Hormel, the man who Spam made rich, had a vexed relationship with the lunchmeat. In a 1945 "Talk of the Town" profile published in The New Yorker, Hormel met writer Brendan Gill over noontime drinks, during which Gill "got the distinct impression that being responsible for Spam might be too great a burden on any one man." The piece sees Hormel waffling on his brand's association with Spam, spending equal time distancing himself from it ("Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't have…") and defending it ("Damn it, we eat it in our own home").
Spam's ability to straddle highbrow and lowbrow is apparently in its DNA.
The budget-friendly meat has enjoyed a recent upswing on the American mainland in part thanks to rising meat costs and a floundering economy: When the recession hit in early 2008, Spam saw its sales jump 10 percent compared to the previous year. A CBS News report noted that the increased numbers were seemingly accompanied by a cultural shift: Even consumers who continued to purchase expensive organic vegetables were adding cans of Spam to their pantries. The meat, once relegated as a quirk of Hawaiian or Asian cuisine, started appearing on haute restaurant menus as a nod to that highbrow/lowbrow mash-up, or perhaps to the chef's feelings of nostalgia for the ingredient. (A quick search of Spam recipes from the '60s reveals dishes like Spam upside-down pie; and Spam sandwiches topped with baked beans.)
Today, its sometimes-kitsch factor is a point of pride, for both Hormel and Spam fans: You can show your affection for Spam with everything from Hormel-authorized T-shirts (reading "I think, therefore I Spam") to crocheted, cat-shaped Spam musubi (available for purchase, naturally, on Etsy). Here's a look back at how Spam first got canned, why it's currently beloved in Hawaii and South Korea, and why Spam remains on many restaurant menus today.
FROM SPAMTOWN, USA TO THE SCURRILOUS FILE
The town of Austin, Minnesota (founded: 1853) occupies just under 12 square miles near the state's southern border, with 24,700 residents as of the 2010 census. It's also home to a street called Spam Boulevard, a restaurant dubbed Johnny's Spamarama, and still more restaurants serving dishes like the "Spam De' Melt" (a grilled cheese stuffed with Spam, bacon, and sour cream). Austin's path to becoming known as "Spamtown, USA" started when George A. Hormel founded his namesake slaughterhouse and meatpacking facility there in 1891, after spending years working in Chicago slaughterhouses. George A. Hormel & Co. became officially incorporated by 1901, processing whole hogs, beef, and sausage casings from its facilities in Austin.
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A car bears the name of the George A. Hormel & Co., 1940s [Photo: Hormel Foods]
By 1929, George's son, Jay Hormel, took over as president (after serving in World War I), but the product that would best effect Hormel's bottom line wouldn't be invented until eight years later. In her book Spam: A Biography, author Carolyn Wyman identifies Hormel's predecessor to Spam as canned pork luncheon meat: Discerning deli-case shoppers would order slices of the canned lunchmeat, shaved off by butchers from their six-pound forms. Jay Hormel set out to design a product appropriate for home use by the consumer, which could be trademarked by the Hormel company (and available in smaller, family-friendly sizes).
According to current Spam brand manager Nicole Behne, there's no one Hormel team member credited with inventing the final ingredient blend, but food historians identify Julius Zillgitt as one Hormel employee who experimented with the original 12-ounce can size. Zillgitt and his colleagues eventually discovered that canning the pork in a vacuum prevented the meat from sweating inside the can, a process that took "a good many years," Hormel later told The New Yorker.
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From top to bottom: Labels from Spam's 1937 debut, 1943, the 1950s, and 1970. [Photos: Hormel Foods]
That recipe, using pork shoulder (once considered an undesirable byproduct of hog butchery), water, salt, sugar, and sodium nitrate (for coloring) remained unchanged until 2009, when Hormel began adding potato starch to sop up the infamous gelatin "layer" that naturally forms when meat is cooked. According to Behne, the recipe change was purely an aesthetic choice: "It looks a lot better now when you open the can." The rest, Hormel insists, has remained the same.
"I knew then and there that the name was perfect."
Although lore behind the name Spam varies, Hormel himself claimed the product was named for a combination of the words "spice" and "ham," despite the fact that neither ingredient appears in Spam. The confusion has led some to speculate that Spam is an acronym for "Shoulder of Pork And Ham," but company line gives Kenneth Daigneau, the brother of a Hormel VP, credit for naming the product. As Hormel tells it, he launched a naming contest for the new product during a New Year's Eve party, when Daigneau spit out "Spam" as if "it were nothing at all," Hormel told Gill. "I knew then and there that the name was perfect."
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Soldiers in a U.S. Army Air Force unit during World War II named their camp "Spamville" in tribute to the product; a 1942 can of Spam bearing a "special economy label" during wartime. [Photos: Hormel Foods]
While housewives in the late '30s soon grew accustomed to the idea of unrefrigerated meat, the brand didn't make its global mark until World War II, when the U.S. military purchased a variety of canned meats — not exclusively Hormel's Spam brand — to feed troops overseas. Hormel's figures put the number at 100 million pounds of Spam sent abroad to both American and Allied soldiers.
Hormel kept a "Scurrilous File" collecting hate mail from American GIs.
As troops started to complain about eating Spam (or some other canned meat variant) for as many as three meals a day, Hormel faced an unexpected anti-Spam backlash. In his 1945 New Yorker interview, Hormel revealed to Gill that he kept a "Scurrilous File" collecting hate mail from American GIs, in which "he dumps the letters of abuse that are sent to him by soldiers everywhere in the world. 'If they think Spam is terrible,' Mr. Hormel told us, 'they ought to have eaten the bully beef we had in the last war.'"
SPAM AS CULINARY TRADITION
During WWII, Spam's reach made its way to England and the countries of the Asian Pacific, where rationing and the presence of American troops saw the meat become a menu staple. "Having the sort of food that can survive in the tropical heat and be kept on a shelf for weeks and months was a huge boon," says food historian Rachel Laudan, who writes extensively about food politics and how empires affect local cuisines. Laudan, who grew up in postwar Britain, has written about how deep-fried Spam fritters "turned up regularly for school lunches… one more in the series of horrors produced by the school cooks" in England.
By the end of WWII — and with thousands of American GIs returning home who would refuse to eat it — Spam saw its role start to slowly shift away from convenient protein source to "sometimes-food" side dish. "When you look at the core of America after the war, Spam really made an evolution away from being that 'center of the plate' meal option," Behne says. "Mom used to make it and put cloves in the Spam and use it as the center of the plate. The evolution definitely started in the '60s where it became more of an ingredient: It was used for sandwiches and as an ingredient in eggs."
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[Photos: Spam]
But while the core of America pushed Spam to the side of their plates, the canned meat became a culinary sensation in much of the Asian Pacific and Hawaii. Asia's present-day fondness for Spam stemmed directly from WWII and following conflicts, during which an entire generation grew up with Spam. In Hawaii, Spam's proliferance happened less due to the presence of American GIs and more to the government restrictions unfairly placed on the local population. "Unlike the mainland, they couldn't intern all the Japanese [in Hawaii]," says Laudan, who spent years living in Hawaii and published The Food of Paradise: Hawaii's Culinary Heritage in 1996. "The economy would have collapsed."
The United States placed sanctions on Hawaiian residents, restricting the deep-sea fishing industries that were mainly run by Japanese-Americans.
Instead, the United States placed sanctions on Hawaiian residents, restricting the deep-sea fishing industries that were mainly run by Japanese-Americans. Because islanders were no longer allowed to fish, Laudan says, "one of the important sources of protein for the islands vanished." Spam — along with other canned luncheon meats and sardines — took its place.
Simultaneously across the Pacific, residents of Korea and Japan "were on the point of starvation," Laudan says. "The cans of Spam coming in were an absolute godsend in those terrible situations at the end of World War II." In Korea, where American forces returned during the Korean War, budae jjigae.
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