SPAM

SPAM, trademarked meat product consisting primarily of ground pork and ham.

SPAM, usually rendered as Spam, was introduced to the market in 1937, its name a portmanteau for spiced ham. The brand name was coined by a New York actor named Ken Daigneau, whose brother was an executive at Hormel Foods, the manufacturer. Daigneau later remarked that he had conceived of the name before there was a product to attach it to, thinking it was memorable. In whatever case, the product was quickly patented and trademarked, with pork shoulder, a cut not much in use otherwise, as its main ingredient.

SPAM was well received in its early years as an easily prepared inexpensive food that lent itself to baking and frying; initially marketed as a lunch meat, it found a place on the dinner table in the lean late years of the Great Depression. However, it did not become a household word until after World War II, for more than 100 million pounds of SPAM were consumed by Allied soldiers and, after the war, by civilians in Allied and the defeated Axis countries alike; future Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev credited SPAM with saving the Russian army during the war. It was not universally popular, however; Hormel maintains in its corporate archives letters from disgruntled service personnel who were tired of being served SPAM meal after meal. Even so, one billion cans of the product had been sold by 1959, a figure that climbed to eight billion by 2012, the last year for which Hormel published sales figures. The company opened a museum devoted to the meat product at its corporate headquarters in Austin, Minnesota, in 1991.

More than 10 varieties of SPAM are available on the market. It remains a popular food item wherever it is sold, but in the United States perhaps no more so than in Hawaii, for which market the company developed a variety with Portuguese sausage seasonings. One popular Hawaiian rendering, SPAM musubi, combines Japanese techniques with the product: a slice of SPAM is sandwiched around a layer or between layers of rice and sesame seeds and wrapped in seaweed, as if a form of sushi. SPAM is also a staple of Filipino cuisine, and South Korea is the world’s second largest consumer of SPAM today.

SPAM has entered the popular lexicon in several ways. In keeping with its widespread use in military kitchens, it has been appropriated in British service slang to mean to be assigned some unpleasant task, such as standing guard duty in a driving rainstorm. More ubiquitously, it has come to denote unwanted mass-targeted e-mails, a sense apparently derived from a well-known skit in the British television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus in which every dish in a restaurant contains SPAM, whether the diner wishes to have it or not. It was even the basis of Monty Python’s award-winning musical comedy Spamalot, a 2005 spoof on the legend of King Arthur.

SPAM is made of a pork and ham mixture, salt, sugar, potato starch, water, and sodium nitrite. The meat is ground and the other ingredients added to it before the mixture is transferred to cans, vacuum-sealed, and cooked inside the cans. After cooling, the cans are ready for sale. In 2022 Hormel claimed that some 13 cans of SPAM were consumed every second.