Spammed!

Well, apparently there is a museum for everything. In Austin, Minnesota, I paid a visit to the Spam Museum, a tribute to the quintessential American mystery meat. It is housed at the world headquarters of Hormel Foods, which has been grinding up various porky parts and stuffing the result into blue cans since 1937.


While walking among the museum's exhibits, you learn that Hormel was founded back in 1891 when George Hormel opened a small butcher shop in Austin. But he had grand visions and the enterprise soon expanded beyond the small city in Minnesota, eventually becoming known worldwide. By 1937 George's son Jay was running things. It was Jay who came up with the canned meat concoction of ground pork shoulder mixed with ham and liberal dashes of salt and other spices. The word "Spam" (for "spiced ham") was the winning entry in a contest held to name the new product.

During World War II, cases of Spam were shipped by the thousands to U.S. troops in Europe and the Pacific. It was a popular item because the meat would stay fresh, or at least edible, without refrigeration. At times the soldiers ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My dad remembered it as "Spam What Am."


Some of the Spam sent to the South Pacific made its way to the native islanders who evidently found it much to their liking. Today, Spam is a favored food in that part of the world. In Hawaii, it's considered a delicacy. Hormel has made versions of Spam available there that can't be found elsewhere including Honey Spam, Spam with Bacon, and Hot and Spicy Spam.

Hormel has a long history of advertising and media sponsorship such as the early-40s "The Hormel Program," starring George Burns and Gracie Allen. Following the war, the company cemented Spam into the national psyche by sending "The Hormel Girls," a sixty-member all-female swing band, across the land singing and extolling Hormel products.



In 1970, a famed sketch on Britain's Monty Python show depicted a cafe where just about all the menu items featured Spam (Spam, eggs, bacon and Spam, for instance). A group of Vikings eating in the cafe would burst into song - "Spam, Spam, Spam, wonderful Spam" - in the midst of the other actors' dialog. You can see a video here. This apparently inspired pranksters during the budding years of the internet to disrupt online news groups by filling the screen with the word "Spam" repeatedly. Thus the word has taken on the meaning of anything - bulk email, for instance - that disrupts normal internet usage.

See what all you can learn in a museum? Alas, they weren't giving out free samples of Spam. They were selling it in the gift shop, but I passed up on the offer.

One more thing about Spam, as if this weren't already too much. There's a website for Spam haiku, the seventeen-syllable Japanese verse form. Some examples:

Tastes like ham, sorta
But clogs up my aorta
Pig rigor morta.

The grim sucking sound
Of the SPAM shucking its skin,
Its hard blue cocoon.

Spock scans the pink meat.
"It's life, Jim," he tells Kirk, "but...
not as we know it."