Spam (food)

Name	Spam
Caption	Spam
Country	United States
Creator	Hormel Foods Corporation
Course	Main course
Served	Hot or Cold
Main ingredient	Pork

Spam (officially trademarked as SPAM) is a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation. The labeled ingredients in the classic variety of Spam are chopped pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, and sodium nitrite as a preservative. Spam's gelatinous glaze, or aspic, forms from the cooling of meat stock. The product has become part of many jokes and urban legends about mystery meat, which has made it part of pop culture and folklore.

Varieties of Spam include Spam Classic, Spam Hot & Spicy, Spam Less Sodium, Spam Lite, Spam Oven Roasted Turkey, Hickory Smoked, Spam with real Hormel Bacon, Spam with Cheese, and Spam Spread. Availability of these varieties varies regionally.

Spam that is sold in North America, South America, and Australia is produced in Austin, Minnesota, (also known as Spam Town USA) and in Fremont, Nebraska. Spam for the UK market is produced in Denmark by Tulip under license from Hormel. Spam is also made in the Philippines and in South Korea. In 2007, the seven billionth can of Spam was sold. On average, 3.8 cans are consumed every second in the United States.

Name origin

Introduced on July 5, 1937, the name "Spam" was chosen when the product, whose original name was far less memorable (Hormel Spiced Ham), began to lose market share. The name was chosen from multiple entries in a naming contest. A Hormel official once stated that the original meaning of the name "Spam" was "Shoulder of Pork and Ham". According to writer Marguerite Patten in Spam – The Cookbook, the name was suggested by Kenneth Daigneau, an actor and the brother of a Hormel vice president, who was given a $100 prize for creating the name. At one time and persisting to this day in certain books, the theory behind the nomenclature of Spam was that the name was a portmanteau of "Spiced Meat and Ham". According to the British documentary-reality show "1940s House", when Spam was offered by the United States to those affected by World War II in the UK, Spam stood for Specially Processed American Meats. Yesterday's Britain, a popular history published by Reader's Digest in 1998 [p. 140], unpacks Spam as "Supply Pressed American Meat" and describes it as an imported "wartime food" of the 1940s.

Many jocular backronyms have been devised, such as "Something Posing As Meat", "Specially Processed Artificial Meat", "Stuff, Pork and Ham", "Spare Parts Animal Meat" and "Special Product of Austin Minnesota".

According to Hormel's trademark guidelines, Spam should be spelled with all capital letters and treated as an adjective, as in the phrase "SPAM luncheon meat".

Nutritional data

Spam is typically sold in cans with a net weight of 340 grams (12 ounces). A 100 gram (3.5 ounce) serving of original Spam provides 310 calories, 13 grams of protein (26% DV), 3 grams of carbohydrates (1% DV), 27 grams of total fat (41% DV), including 10 grams of saturated fat (49% DV). The cholesterol content of Spam is 70 milligrams (23% DV). A serving also contains 57% of the recommended daily intake of sodium (1369 milligrams). Spam provides the following vitamins and minerals: 0% vitamin A, 1% vitamin C , 1% calcium, 5% iron, 3% magnesium, 9% potassium, 12% zinc, and 5% copper.

Varieties

There are several different flavors of Spam products, including: Spam Classic – original flavor Spam Hot & Spicy – with Tabasco flavor

United States and territories

In the United States in the aftermath of World War II, a troupe of ex-G.I. women was created by Hormel Foods to promote Spam from coast to coast. The group was known as the Hormel Girls and associated the food with being patriotic. In 1948, two years after the group's conception, the troupe had grown to 60 women with 16 forming an orchestra. The show went on to become a radio program where the main selling point was Spam. The Hormel Girls were disbanded in 1953. Spam is still quite popular in the United States, but is sometimes associated with economic hardship because of its relatively low cost.

The residents of the state of Hawaii and the territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) consume the most Spam per capita in the United States. On average, each person on Guam consumes 16 tins of Spam each year and the numbers at least equal this in the CNMI. Guam, Hawaii, and Saipan, the CNMI's principal island, have the only McDonald's restaurants that feature Spam on the menu. In Hawaii, Burger King began serving Spam in 2007 on its menu to compete with the local McDonald's chains. In Hawaii, Spam is so popular it is sometimes dubbed "The Hawaiian Steak". One popular Spam dish in Hawaii is Spam musubi, where cooked Spam is combined with rice and nori seaweed and classified as onigiri.

Spam was introduced into the aforementioned areas, in addition to other islands in the Pacific such as Okinawa and the Philippine Islands, during the U.S. military occupation in World War II. Since fresh meat was difficult to get to the soldiers on the front, World War II saw the largest use of Spam. GIs started eating Spam for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (Some soldiers referred to Spam as "ham that didn't pass its physical" and "meatloaf without basic training".) Surpluses of Spam from the soldiers' supplies made their way into native diets. Consequently, Spam is a unique part of the history and effects of U.S. influence in the Pacific.

In these locales, varieties of Spam unavailable in other markets are sold. These include Honey Spam, Spam with Bacon, and Hot and Spicy Spam.

In the CNMI, lawyers from Hormel have threatened legal action against the local press for running articles decrying the ill-effects of high Spam consumption on the health of the local population.

Austin, Minnesota has a restaurant with a menu devoted exclusively to Spam, called "Johnny's SPAMarama Menu".

UK

In the United Kingdom spam is often sliced, battered and deep-fried becoming known as 'spam fritters', and is still a popular way of eating Spam today. It gained popularity in the 1940s during World War II, as a consequence of the Lend-Lease Act when Hormel began to increase production towards British and Russian markets.

After World War II, Newforge Foods, part of the Fitch Lovell group, were awarded the license to produce the product in the UK (doing so at its Gateacre factory, Liverpool), where it stayed until production switched to the Danish Crown Group (owners of the Tulip Food Company) in 1998, forcing the closure of the Liverpool factory and the loss of 140 jobs. By the early 1970s the name Spam was often misused to describe any tinned meat product containing pork, such as pork luncheon meat.

The image of Spam as a low cost meat product gave rise to the Scottish colloquial term "Spam valley" to describe certain affluent housing areas where residents appear to be wealthy but in reality may be living at poverty levels.

Asia

In China, Spam is an increasingly popular food item, and often used in sandwiches. Hormel has had a joint-venture in Shanghai for 16 years which has been highly successful in promoting Spam. In 2005, the Chinese division of Spam was one of the most profitable parts of the Hormel company. This development is due, in part, to the increasing per capita income in Shanghai, coupled with the expansion of their food diet towards more meat.

In Okinawa, Japan, Spam has become very popular. The product is added into onigiri alongside eggs, used as a staple ingredient in the traditional Okinawan dish chanpurū, and a Spam burger is sold by local fast food chain Jef.

In Hong Kong, Spam is commonly served with instant noodles and fried eggs, and is a popular item in cha chaan teng. Spam is less popular than Ma Ling Meats, its main competitor in the Hong Kong processed meat market. Although recent controversies surrounding high salt content in Ma Ling products may allow Spam to gain market share.

In the Philippines, Spam is a popular meal, most commonly eaten with fried rice and eggs or as a sandwich with pandesal. It is often eaten for breakfast. During the rescue efforts after the catastrophic typhoon of 2009, Hormel Foods donated over 30,000 pounds of Spam to the Philippines branch of the Red Cross.

In South Korea, Spam () is popular in households as an accompaniment to rice. A local television advertisement claims that it is the most tasty when consumed with white rice and gim (laver seaweed used for some types of handrolls). To this day, a widespread black market of US military Spam which totals nearly 400,000 cans is found on the Korean black market. In contemporary Seoul, South Korea, Spam is considered a delicacy and can be seen in store windows alongside imported European luxury goods such as wine, exotic mushrooms and Swiss chocolates. Although the contents are the same processed pork product that is sold in the North American market, the packaging is more decorative. Spam is also an original ingredient in budae jjigae ("army base stew"), a spicy stew with different types of preserved meat.

Spam and similar meat preserves can be bought in gift sets that may contain nothing but the meat preserve or include other products such as food oil or tuna. When invited to another person's home, guests may present their hosts with such a set, or with other food gifts such as fresh fruit, beverages or tteok.

The surfeit of Spam in both North and South Korea during the Korean War led to the establishment of the Spam kimbap (sushi roll). because of a scarcity of fish and other traditional kimbap products such as kimchi or fermented cabbage, Spam was added to a rice roll with kimchi and cucumber and wrapped in seaweed. Spam was also used by US soldiers in Korea as a means of trading for items, services or information around their bases. Spam is also remarkably popular to a majority of the population, and outranks Coca-Cola and KFC in status as a foodstuff.

In Israel, a kosher variant of Spam, known as Loof (, distortion of meatloaf), was produced by Richard Levi, and mostly used as part of field rations by the Israeli Defense Forces. A Glatt kosher version was also produced. It was phased out of field rations during the early 2000s and was finally removed from rations when production ceased in 2009.

In popular culture

In the 1960s, the original Mercury astronauts were referred to as "Spam in a can" by aircraft test pilots, as a derogatory reference to their restricted role as being unable to control the flight of the Mercury spacecraft in which they were launched.

In 1970, the Monty Python comedy group televised a sketch "Spam" in which almost every breakfast meal served in a restaurant included Spam. The dialog hyped the menu as being "Spam, Spam, Spam and more Spam". In the 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, the first food the main characters eat is Spam.

In the early 1980's radio commercials began running in which people were asked: "Where does SPAM come from?", the answer most aired was: "I dunno, is there somekind of SPAM-animal running around?" For quite awhile many believed SPAM came from "some kind of SPAM-animal". Hormel went on record indicating a "SPAM-animal" does not exist, and SPAM came from where it always was advertised as.

In the 1990s, excessive, unwanted e-mail was termed "spam" after the phenomenon of marketers drowning out e-mail discussions, by flooding Usenet newsgroups and individuals' email with junk mail advertising messages. This was due to some early internet users who flooded forums with the word "spam" recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of Spam in the Monty Python sketch. This phenomenon has been reported in court decisions handed down in lawsuits against spammers - see, for example, CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015, n. 1 (S.D.Ohio 1997).

The song "Spam Again" on the Maureen Tucker album Life in Exile After Abdication (1989) is written from the perspective of someone whose poverty forces them to make spam a staple of their diet.

The Python programming language, named after Monty Python, prefers to use the words "spam", "ham", and "eggs" as metasyntactic variables, instead of the traditional words "foo" or "bar" or "baz".

In 2004, the Broadway musical comedy Spamalot was created as a parody of the 1975 Monty Python film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

In 2008, Bethesda Softworks added a food item to the "fallout" game franchise called 'Cram', a parody of spam down to the same style of packaging and font. However, it comes in a cardboard box instead of Spam's signature tin can.

Spam celebrations

Spam is celebrated in a small local festival in Austin, Minnesota, where Hormel corporate headquarters are located. The event, known as Spam Jam, is a carnival-type celebration that coincides with local Fourth of July festivities, featuring parades and fireworks that often relate to the popular luncheon meat. Austin is also home to the Spam Museum, and the plant that produces Spam for most of North America and Europe. In addition to the periodic celebration, there is a national recipe competition where submissions are accepted at the top forty state fairs in the nation.

Hawaii also holds an annual version of Spam Jam in Waikiki during the last week of April.

The small town of Shady Cove, Oregon is home to the annual Spam Parade and Festival, with the city allocating $1500 for it.

The Spam Jam is not to be confused with Spamarama, which is a yearly festival held around April Fool's Day in Austin, Texas. The theme of Spamarama is gentle parody of Spam, rather than straightforward celebration: the event at the heart of the festival is a Spam cook-off that originated as a challenge to produce an appetizing recipe for the meat. The festival includes light sporting activities and musical acts, in addition to the cook-off.

See also

Meat by-product

Potted meat food product

Advanced meat recovery methods

Pickled foods

References

External links

The official Spam web site

Spam - The Official UK website

The Book of Spam

More Spam Recipes

Saving 'Spam:' Hormel's Fight to Protect Its Famous Product's Name According to ABC News, Hormel is involved in a multi-million dollar trademark dispute with Spam Arrest, a company that blocks obnoxious emails.

Category:Canned food Category:Hawaiian cuisine Category:Brand name meats Category:Meatpacking Category:Hormel Category:1937 introductions Category:Hormel brands *