What’s really in Spam?

Illustration by Slug Signorino

Cecil replies:

In the interest of thoroughness I thought that somebody here at Dopecorp should actually eat some Spam before we wrote about it. You’d think I was asking these guys to throw themselves on a grenade. “Cecil, I ate a damn Circus Peanut,” wailed my assistant Jane. “I did laundry. Hell, I even sniffed out sperm trees. This is where I draw the line.” Little Ed was likewise unwilling, the pup. So it was up to me.

I bought a tin and popped it open, fully expecting to be bowled over by who knows what awful aroma. Didn’t happen. The smell was … surprisingly mild. Moreover, the stuff was edible, if salty. Granted, I ate Circus Peanuts without ill effects, and I’ve had a couple of airline meals that I considered tasty, so maybe I just have a high threshold of disgust. Still, when I see the reaction some people have to this stuff — come on, folks, get a grip. Our ancestors ate meat they’d just killed with a rock. What’s so bad about Spam?

What does make you a bit queasy is the nutritional labeling on the side of the can. A single serving — two thin slices — contains 30 percent of your daily saturated-fat quota, 31 percent of your sodium, and 13 percent of your cholesterol. If people ate Spam exclusively we’d solve the Social Security crisis in a generation. Nobody would live long enough to collect.

On to your questions. The common assumption is that Spam is made of stuff even pigs don’t like to admit they’ve got. Not so, says a spokeswoman for Hormel Foods, which manufactures Spam. It contains a mixture of ham and chopped pork shoulder. (Ham is the pig’s thigh; pork is everything else.) Ham is Hormel’s top-of-the-line product, and Spam was created in 1937 partly to use up what was left of the pig after the ham had been removed. But only the wholesome parts.

The name Spam, dreamed up by the actor brother of a Hormel vice president, is short for “spiced ham.” (Cute story: Said brother supposedly had this brainstorm at a name-the-product party, in which you had to contribute a possible name in order to get a drink. It took a few rounds, so nobody is sure whether the guy was inspired or just drunk.) Since Hormel is in Austin, Minnesota, these are Minnesota spices: sugar and salt.

As for what Monty Python saw in Spam, one supposes they were celebrating the ineffable, I dunno, pinkness of it all. (The Brits, like so many others, had been introduced to Spam during World War II.) Their famous Spam sketch, in which the dialogue is periodically drowned out by the chorus “Spam, Spam, Spam,” was the inspiration for the Internet term “Spam,” meaning the junk E-mail that now floods the net. Presumably a similar sort of artistic impulse animates the annual Spam sculpture contest as well as a Web site for users’ Spam haikus (http://web.mit.edu/jync/www/spam/). Samples from the more than 19,000 currently on file:

The color of Spam
Is natural as the sky:
A block of sunrise

Pink tender morsel
Glistening with salty gel
What the hell is it?

Old man seeks doctor
“I eat Spam daily,” he says
Angioplasty

Pink beefy temptress
I can no longer remain
Vegetarian

Thanks to aggressive marketing, worldwide Spam sales have grown substantially over the past few years, with well over 150 million cans sold annually. Previously, Hormel marketers concede, people thought of Spam as something you kept in the basement in case the refrigerator went out during a nuclear war. To change this perception, Hormel boss Joel Johnson promoted concepts such as the Spamburger, sold Spam merchandise (e.g., Spam-can earrings — check ’em out at http://www.spamgift.com/), and even made a concession to the current interest in not dying young by introducing a low- (well, lower-) fat Spam. Which brings us to your question about chicken Spam: they do make it, sort of — chicken is one of the things that go into the aforementioned low-fat Spam, known as Spam Lite. Some may find the taste a little funkier than that of the regular version. But what the heck, it’s still pink.

The secret of Spam

Dear Cecil:

Regarding Spam, is it true, as travel writer Paul Theroux claims, that the people of the South Pacific love their Spam because it tastes so much like … people?

— Mary E. Sage, via the Internet

Cecil Adams

Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com.