Spam Turns 80 and It’s Still Here

By Cam Patterson

Whether you loved it or hated it or had to lug it to school in your lunch box back in the 1940s right up to the new millennium, you can’t ignore that fact that Spam is here to stay and has earned that spot in our popular culture.

I’ve seen it all when it came to Spam. Kids in the lunchroom, most scrunching their noses when they opened their sandwiches and realized mom packed the ungodly meat substance and not peanut butter. I’ve seen touring bands fry it up in the pan and woof it down with that other food group staple, Kraft Dinner. There was nothing like a giant helping of Spam and KD out on the open road to satisfy your appetite. Or the real Spam lovers who spoon it right out of the can like an after dinner dessert – you can almost hear the theme music that made Spam even more famous during the 1950s.

“For us in the meat industry, we owe a good ole’ “Happy Birthday” to that can of Spam”

Since its turning 80, let’s look back at the history of Spam.

It came about during the Great Depression, a solution that was needed for the surplus of pork shoulder meat since few could afford to buy the prime cuts. The Hormel Company in Minnesota was the birthplace, straight from the inventive mind of Jay Hormel, son of George. Hormel was known as the forerunner of canned pork products but with Spam the mold was broken. Made with pork, water, sugar, potato starch and sodium nitrate, it quickly became a favorite.

It would be World War II that would really set Spam’s place in pop icon status. With soldiers living in the trenches on rations barely edible, Spam was a treat that did not have to be refrigerated, and many veterans will tell you, nothing boosted morale like a box of those Spam tin cans getting passed around.

By the mid-1950s, Spam had sold a billion cans worldwide, even had a radio show named after it, and in the 1970s Monty Python made a famous skit about it.

For us in the meat industry, we owe a good ole’ “Happy Birthday” to that can of Spam.

And for the record, I was that kid scrunching his nose every time I opened my Batman lunchbox.

Source: MeatBusiness