A Brief History of SPAM

it's in every grocery store from hamburg to miami from honolulu to tokyo hell you can even find it in most gas stations and convenience stores it is a staple of any working-class american family or anyone living on an island nation and it is perhaps the most divisive food product anywhere on the shelf you either love it or you hate it no in between but you at least knew its name and sometimes that's all that matters i'm of course talking about spam the simple amalgamation of seven ingredients and two different cuts of pork either evokes fond feelings or disgust depending on who you ask but i don't think any food product ever made has as interesting a history as this brand of luncheon meat so let's give this process pork product its fair shake because we owe more to it than you might think the process of storing meat has always been a conundrum for humans meat if left to the elements will begin to putrefy after as little as a few hours so our early ancestors had to prepare the entire animal as quickly as possible and consume it before the day was done and hunting and killing the animal is no small task when your only tools available to you were flint tips spears and arrows the agricultural revolution fixed the hard part in finding animals to eat as now you could raise as many as you wanted and prepare them for the entire community at any time but around the same time humans began to smoke meat to dry it out so it would hold off rotting away for weeks at a time the downside was a lot of nutrients were wasted and the end product was tough and hard to eat unless prepared a certain way and if you messed it up there was really no way to go back and unmess it up salting meat also became popular a short time later by layering meat in a pod or barrel and absolutely dousing it in salt you could store it safely for up to an entire year in some cases however it had one major downside it was salted while raw and in order to prepare it for consumption you had to soak it in water for several minutes to get the salt out and then you could finally cook it a long and tedious process and impossible if you couldn't find a consistent water supply or a source of fire some exhausted soldiers from 18th century wars wrote in their journals how after hard marches they couldn't even find the strength to prepare their ration of salt part for the day so they just ran the risk of dysentery and dunked it in ice water and ate it raw not exactly something i recommend however the 19th century changed everything with the advent of canning now you could prepare just about any food even meat products take them straight from the pot and put them in a can seal it and it would be just as good as the date was sealed a year or two down the road once you pop the top there was no prep work you could just eat it straight out of the can lots of shoddy food came out during this time though probably the most famous example was the food given to the crew of the hms erebus and terror on their northwest passage voyage they were given three years worth of canned food in preparation for the trip but they went missing and were never heard from again until relatively recently when their ships were discovered and the crew had apparently abandoned them and went insane because the cans were sealed with lead eating lead tainted food for a few years has some let's just call them interesting effects fast forward to the 20th century a major canned food corporation hormel foods introduces a brand new product on july 5th 1937 called spam the origins of the name are quite murky but it's almost certainly a contraction of the two words spiced ham canned processed meat products had existed before potted meat was a staple of western diet by now so why make this new product what was so special about it well like many things in america the invention of spam was the result of corporate and profiteering some port producers had gotten in with hormel foods and wanted to push a new meat product that utilized pork shoulder as its main ingredient pork shoulder was a large part of the pig but at the time it wasn't that popular of a cut at the butcher shop so to offset their wasted pork shoulders they tapped hormel to take their excess and make spam it was a simple product consisting of just seven ingredients both then and now pork shoulder ham hock salt water modified cornstarch as a binder to keep the whole thing together sugar and sodium nitrate a popular preservative being introduced in the midst of the great depression spam offered a cheap and easily accessible source of protein that most people could afford and its long shelf life meant that people could buy a lot of it and put it away from when times got really tough but like most other things in the 20th century world war ii thrusted into the spotlight more than any marketing campaign ever could the u.s was fighting a war on three fronts north africa later italy western europe and the pacific the draft had filled its ranks with able-bodied men but now came the problem of feeding all these hundreds of thousands of gi's spread across three continents everything had to come by ship and that could take weeks if the weather was bad and u-boats caused too many problems so how are you supposed to get fresh food to the front like this easy you can it and come spam to the rescue the luncheon loaf could be sliced up and fried in a pan like knock off bacon chopped up and added to pasta as a stand-in for meatballs or simply eaten straight out of the can as it was already pre-cooked gis had a sort of love-hate relationship with the stuff rumors circulated that its name was an acronym for scientifically produced animal matter or special army meat they often joke that spam was ham that didn't pass its physical or meatloaf without basic training but compared to food from world war 1 spam was a massive upgrade during that war the most popular dish was mcconaucy stew which was just canned corn beef mixed with some vegetables or even worse bully beef which was an honest to god mystery meat that many soldiers believed to be from horses that had died trying to pull supplies to the front but with spam though you at least knew you were getting pork not the best cuts of pork but pork nonetheless over the course of the war 68 000 tons of spam were purchased by the us military and quite a bit of it ended up in the hands of our allies both great britain and the soviet union russian soldiers wrote in their journals how they were on the brink of starvation on the eastern front only to have a creative spam show up at the 11th hour and save them many said they cried with tears of joy as they ate it nikita khrushchev then a general in the army and later general secretary of the ussr effectively its dictator wrote in his memoirs without spam there was no way we would have been able to feed our army hey maybe that was why he was always more friendly with the us than stalin ever was by 1945 spam was on all corners of the globe and completely inescapable and it should come as no surprise that when all those gis came home they took their diets with them spam flew off the shelves for the rest of the decade and hell it still does today places that were occupied by the us army and marines during and after world war ii still love spam places like okinawa the philippines and hawaii have the highest spam consumption per capita of any places in the world and even back here in the states on the mainland where fresh pork and beef is easy to come by spam is still a commonplace item found in pantries all over of course with its post-war popularity came a lot of imitators armor's treat brand is the biggest and there are tons of generic brands in grocery stores all over the place the danish have dac the canadians have cam and i'm sure there's at least 100 other copycats i'm missing but if you ask me a true connoisseur of cheap canned meats nothing beats the simple bacony taste of the real thing many of the others have mechanically separated chicken or cut with lard or other by-products but span has remained the same since day one as weird as it sounds spam has a unique quality all its own so you're probably wondering at this point why is it synonymous with unwanted emails and flooded chats filled with repeating messages while on the surface the obvious answer is that spam itself is filled with unwanted things after all it was originally conceived as a way to get rid of excess pork products people couldn't sell but the true story of where the slang term spam originated from can be traced back to a monty python sketch unfortunately i'll get copyright claimed if i show you the whole bit so i'll leave a link down in the description and give you the synopsis an older couple enters a restaurant for breakfast and are offered only items that include spam remember how i said a certain generation grew up with it everywhere the lady has had enough and declares i hate spam what do you mean and then a bunch of vikings in the corner start chanting spam spam spam and eventually break out into song if they're not stopped soon enough [Music] yeah it's funnier if you actually watch the whole skit in its entirety but that brand of repetitive off-the-wall random humor that monty python was known for struck a chord with just the type of 80s weirdos you'd expect computer programmers in their circles if you repeated something in a chat room too much or just sent unwanted chats that was called spamming and it is now a permanent part of our language whether you're on facebook twitter twitch or god forbid in the real world just talking to real life people you can't get away from the word spam it just has way too many uses at this point hormel foods actually tried to sue tech companies that tried to use the word spam in their branding or programming but pretty quickly they gave in and eventually came to embrace it they even went so far as to outright sponsor the mighty python musical good on them even without the everyday use of the word online the actual product of spam is still in the national consciousness everyone has an opinion on it and just about all of them have tried it at least once in their lives and even the ones who hate it still know somebody who loves it and has a few cans stuffed away in their pantry whether you're on an island in the pacific or back here in the mainland us part of the greatest generation a boomer or a zoomer give spam a try odds are i think you'll like it either ironically or genuinely anyway i'm slap shoes thanks for watching and until next time y'all take it easy [Music] you

Channel: S1apSh0es

Views: 124,173

Keywords: SPAM, NASCAR, Lake Speed, canned meat, luncheon meat, recipe, luncheon loaf, history, WW2 food, what soldiers ate, army spam, military history, army food, slapshoes, slap shoes, S1ap, slap, S1apSh0es, S1ap Sh0es, history of spam, spam history, spam and world war ii, april fools, April Fool's, april fools videos, highlights, Richmond, Monty Python, spamalot, musical

Id: koyIOsQG8Rg

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2022