Spam (food)

(Spam Twitter)-Spam (officially trademarked as SPAM®, possibly a portmanteau of "Spiced Ham") is a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation. The labeled ingredients in the classic variety of Spam are chopped pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, and sodium nitrite as a preservative. Spam's gelatinous glaze, or aspic, forms from the cooling of meat stock. The product has become part of many jokes and urban legends about mystery meat, which has made it part of pop culture and folklore.

Varieties of Spam include Spam Classic, Spam Hot & Spicy, Spam Less Sodium, Spam Lite, Spam Oven Roasted Turkey, Hickory Smoked, Spam with real Hormel Bacon, Spam with Cheese, and Spam Spread. Availability of these varieties varies regionally.

Nutritional data

Spam is typically sold in cans with a net weight of 340 grams (12 ounces). A 100 gram (3.5 ounce) serving of original Spam provides 310 calories, 13 grams of protein (26% DV), 3 grams of carbohydrates (1% DV), 27 grams of total fat (41% DV), including 10 grams of saturated fat (49% DV). The cholesterol content of Spam is 70 milligrams (23% DV). A serving also contains 57% of the recommended daily intake of sodium (1369 milligrams). Spam provides the following vitamins and minerals: 0% vitamin A, 1% vitamin C , 1% calcium, 5% iron, 3% magnesium, 9% potassium, 12% zinc, and 5% copper.

Varieties

There are several different flavors of Spam products, including:

Spam Classic – original flavor

Spam Hot & Spicy – with Tabasco flavor

Spam Less Sodium – "25% less sodium"

Spam Lite – "33% less calories and 50% less fat" – made from pork shoulder meat, ham, and mechanically separated chicken

Spam Oven Roasted Turkey

Spam Hickory Smoke flavor

Spam Spread – "if you're a spreader, not a slicer ... just like Spam Classic, but in a spreadable form"

Spam with Bacon

Spam with Cheese

Spam Garlic

Spam Golden Honey Grail – a limited-release special flavor made in honor of Monty Python's Spamalot Broadway musical

Spam Mild

Spam Hot Dogs

In addition to the variety of flavors, Spam is sold in tins smaller than the twelve-ounce standard size. Spam Singles are also available, which are a single sandwich-sized slice of Spam Classic or Lite, wrapped in plastic instead of a metal container.

United States and territories

In the United States in the aftermath of World War II, a troupe of ex-G.I. women was created by Hormel Foods to promote Spam from coast to coast. The group was known as the Hormel Girls and associated the food with being patriotic. In 1948, two years after the group's conception, the troupe had grown to 60 women with 16 forming an orchestra. The show went on to become a radio program where the main selling point was Spam. The Hormel Girls were disbanded in 1953. Spam is still quite popular in the United States, but is sometimes associated with economic hardship because of its relatively low cost.

The residents of the state of Hawaii and the territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) consume the most Spam per capita in the United States. On average, each person on Guam consumes 16 tins of Spam each year and the numbers at least equal this in the CNMI. Guam, Hawaii, and Saipan, the CNMI's principal island, have the only McDonald's restaurants that feature Spam on the menu. In Hawaii, Burger King began serving Spam in 2007 on its menu to compete with the local McDonald's chains. In Hawaii, Spam is so popular it is sometimes dubbed "The Hawaiian Steak". One popular Spam dish in Hawaii is Spam musubi, where cooked Spam is combined with rice and nori seaweed and classified as onigiri.

Europe

In the United Kingdom spam is often sliced, battered and deep-fried becoming known as 'spam fritters', and is still a popular way of eating Spam today. It gained popularity in the 1940s during World War II, as a consequence of the Lend-Lease Act when Hormel began to increase production towards British and Russian markets.

Asia

Spam is often served with rice in Asia.

In Okinawa, Japan, Spam has become very popular. The product is added into onigiri alongside eggs, used as a staple ingredient in the traditional Okinawan dish chanpurū, and a Spam burger is sold by local fast food chain Jef.

In Hong Kong, Spam is commonly served with instant noodles and fried eggs, and is a popular item in cha chaan teng. Spam is less popular than Ma Ling Meats, its main competitor in the Hong Kong processed meat market. Although recent controversies surrounding high salt content in Ma Ling products may allow Spam to gain market share.

In the Philippines, Spam is a popular meal, most commonly eaten with fried rice and eggs or as a sandwich with pandesal. It is often eaten for breakfast. During the rescue efforts after the catastrophic typhoon of 2009, Hormel Foods donated over 30,000 pounds of Spam to the Philippines branch of the Red Cross.

Name origin

Introduced on July 5, 1937, the name "Spam" was chosen when the product, whose original name was far less memorable (Hormel Spiced Ham), began to lose market share. The name was chosen from multiple entries in a naming contest. A Hormel official once stated that the original meaning of the name "Spam" was "Shoulder of Pork and Ham". According to writer Marguerite Patten in Spam – The Cookbook, the name was suggested by Kenneth Daigneau, an actor and the brother of a Hormel vice president, who was given a $100 prize for creating the name. At one time and persisting to this day in certain books, the theory behind the nomenclature of Spam was that the name was a portmanteau of "Spiced Meat and Ham". According to the British documentary-reality show "1940s House", when Spam was offered by the United States to those affected by World War II in the UK, Spam stood for Specially Processed American Meats. Yesterday's Britain, a popular history published by Reader's Digest in 1998 [p. 140], unpacks Spam as "Supply Pressed American Meat" and describes it as an imported "wartime food" of the 1940s.

In popular culture

In the 1960s, the original Mercury astronauts were referred to as "Spam in a can" by aircraft test pilots, as a derogatory reference to their restricted role as being unable to control the flight of the Mercury spacecraft in which they were launched.

In 1970, the Monty Python comedy group televised a sketch "Spam" in which almost every breakfast meal served in a restaurant included Spam. The dialog hyped the menu as being "Spam, Spam, Spam and more Spam".

In the 1990s, excessive, unwanted e-mail was termed "spam" after the phenomenon of marketers drowning out e-mail discussions, by flooding Usenet newsgroups and individuals' email with junk mail advertising messages. This was due to some early internet users who flooded forums with the word "spam" recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of Spam in the Monty Python sketch. This phenomenon has been reported in court decisions handed down in lawsuits against spammers - see, for example, CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015, n. 1 (S.D.Ohio 1997).

The Python programming language, named after Monty Python, prefers to use the words "spam", "ham", and "eggs" as metasyntactic variables, instead of the traditional words "foo" or "bar" or "baz".

In 2004, the Broadway musical comedy Spamalot was created as a parody of the 1975 Monty Python film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.