Growing up as a small kid in the seventies and eighties I always remember eating this soft spreadable meat product that my whole family used to eat on sandwiches or on a cracker & being a kid I wouldn’t know any different if it was good for me or where it came from. But today I wouldn’t go near it as it reminds me of jelly meat for pet consumption. My idea of eating meat does not come out of a tin, but in saying this it is some product that has been on our supermarket shelves for a very long time & available all over the world.
Spam is a brand of canned precooked meat made by Hormel Foods Corporation an American food company. It was first introduced in 1937. Ken Daigneau, brother of a company executive, won a $100 prize that year in a competition to name the item.
The name SPAM is a family hidden secret that Hormel claims that the name is only known by a small circle of former business company executives. But food experts say that the name is an abbreviation of “spiced ham”, “spare meat”, or “shoulders of pork and ham. Even some say that it stands for “Specially Processed American Meat”.
The ingredients of SPAM consists of pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, sugar, and sodium nitrite as a preservative. Natural gelatine forms during cooking in its tins on the production line.
SPAM became very popular thanks to World War II for the delivery of fresh meat was almost impossible so it became part of a soldier’s diet. Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the US military before the World War ended.
During World War II and the occupations which followed, Spam was introduced into Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a unique part of the history and effects of U.S. influence in the Pacific.
Spam is sold in 41 countries on six continents and trademarked in over 100 countries by 2003, with the US totalling nearly 122 million cans annually. British prime minister during the 1980s Margaret Thatcher later referred to it as a “wartime delicacy. In addition to increasing production for the U.K.
As innovation in food has developed as the years have moved on so has SPAM with different flavoured meat spams such as Spam Chorizo, Spam Turkey, smoked Spam and the list goes on.
So even though I might not like Spam it certainly has helped part of the food chain & has been part of a world war that has helped the survival of many soldiers around the world and seems to continue to be a permeant product in the food world.
Please try this recipe. This is a good idea for a bar snack with a nice cold beer.
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