[Franek]

Spam again

It was the grub GIs loved to grumble about—not because it wasn't tasty, but because it was always there, sometimes three times a day.

by Bruce Heydt

The 20th-century Chinese writer Lin Yutang once defined patriotism as the memory of what we ate as children. I grew up in the years immediately following World War II, and some of my most vivid memories are set in my family’s kitchen. I can still see the green tiled floor and the chrome-and-Formica dinner table. I remember the food I ate there. In particular, I recall the smells and the tastes of two meals that my mother served with well-planned regularity. The first was a dish served mainly for breakfasts, which my father, an Eighth Army Air Force vet, tactfully called “poop on a shingle.” (I think I must have been a teenager before I heard the uncensored military slang for creamed chipped beef on toast.) The second one often made its unmistakably rectangular appearance at dinner: in a word, Spam.
Say that word to a WWII veteran, and you’re in for a true gut reaction. My own memories of Spam and the frequency with which it appeared on my plate are only a faint shadow of what the so-called “miracle meat” brings to mind for those who ate it seemingly three times a day for the length of their military service. For many, it must have seemed as though there were no food other than this ubiquitous, gelatinous, pink, canned concoction.
In fact, the Hormel company had celebrated Spam’s birth not long before the war, in the mid-1930s. It was developed not in response to a prophetic vision of the need for a non-perishable, easily transported military ration—nor, as some may still think, as a practical joke played by someone in the US War Department—but in response to the vision of one man, Jay Hormel. President of the meat packing company that shared his family name, Hormel had already introduced canned ham to the American consumer. Now, looking for a way to turn previously discarded pork shoulder meat into a marketable product, he hit upon the idea for an inexpensive canned luncheon treat that fit the budget of Depression-era housewives and had a much longer shelf life than other meats.
Hormel’s canned pork shoulder debuted in 1937 as Hormel Spiced Ham, but soon reemerged as “Spam” after actor Kenneth Daigneau, brother of a Hormel vice president, won the $100 prize in a contest to rename the product. So the story goes. Some sources say the name is a merging of “Spiced” and “Ham”; others stand by a derivation from “Shoulder of Pork and Ham.”
Strange as it would have seemed to most WWII servicemen, Spam spawned many imitations in the years before the war. Though it would soon become the butt of jokes and unsettling rumors about its ingredients, Spam actually compared favorably to most of these knock-offs. In the light-hearted book Spam: A Biography, Carolyn Wyman (herself the child of a Spam-fed WWII serviceman), writes that “although the pork shoulder in Hormel’s luncheon loaves was filet mignon compared to the lips, tongue, and yes, even pig snouts competitors put in the ones they came out with following Hormel’s success, consumers couldn’t tell the difference by their appearance.”

When America entered the war in 1941 and began shipping fighting men overseas, military officials bought large quantities of Spam for the same reason housewives bought it—it was cheap, easily transportable, had a long shelf life—and yes, it was fairly nutritious. But Spam was not the only canned meat to go to war. According to Wyman, the army initially bought 10 different varieties of canned meat to feed the troops. That number grew to 60 by the war’s end. These products found their way into K and B rations (field and communal rations, respectively), where Hormel’s pork shoulder ended up cheek-to-jowl with its competitors’ canned pig ears, noses, and tongues. Soon, the troops were eating these dubious delicacies as often as three times a day. To fed-up servicemen, it was all Spam.