Yum: Spam jumps on pumpkin spice bandwagon

Pumpkin spice Spam goes on sale Sept. 23. It will be available online through the Spam and Walmart websites. Two cans per package. The marketing message is “eat one, give one.” Trick or treat?

Spam, now an “old man” on supermarket shelves, is benefiting from new waves of publicity, giving it exposure to a whole new generation of consumers. The product was invented in 1937, as a “miracle meat in a tin can,” manufactured by Hormel Foods Corporation of Austin, Minn.

Described as the “meat of many uses,” you can eat Span straight out of the can, grill it, bake it, fry it and even microwave it. Spam caught on quickly because it was budget friendly. The nation was still scratching its way out the Great Depression. By 1940, about 70% of Americans had “dined on Spam.”

Austin became “Spam Town, U.S.A.” The Spam Museum there offers free admission. Visit Johnny’s Spamarama for lunch and try the “Spam De’ Melt” (a grilled cheese stuffed with Spam, bacon and sour cream).

Hormel says the basic Spam recipe is a blend of simple ingredients. Begin with a ground pork shoulder and ham mixture, and add salt, water, potato starch, sugar and sodium nitrite.

The mixture is inserted into the familiar 12-ounce metal cans; lids are applied through a vacuum-sealing process. The cans are then cooked in a giant “cooker” that holds 66,000 units at one time, according to Karin Miner, a regular contributor to Mashed, an online destination of food lovers.

To mix up its batches of pumpkin spice Spam, Hormel is not injecting any real pumpkin in the mixture. The company says it can make the product taste like pumpkin spice by adding cinnamon, clove, allspice and nutmeg.

Throughout the years, Spam has been a dagnabbit punching bag – a product that has been spoofed, scoffed at, maligned and disparaged…but Spam has survived and thrived.

Meghan Jones of Reader’s Digest magazine reported that the Spam brand could be an “abbreviated version of ‘shoulder of pork and ham,’ or short for ‘spiced ham.’”

Miner suggested that Spam is an acronym for “something posing as meat.” Some jokester once opined that Spam stands for “squirrel, possum and muskrat.” Company officials just laugh it off. They are resolved to keep the origin of the name “a secret.”

As background, George A. Hormel established a slaughterhouse and meatpacking facility in Austin in 1891, and by 1901, the company was processing whole hogs, beef and sausage in Austin.

Spam helped the Allies to win World War II, as soldiers remained fit and well-fed by “feasting” on Spam; the product didn’t need refrigeration and had a long shelf life, Miner reported.

She said former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs: “It tasted good. Without Spam, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands.”

American GIs termed Spam as “ham that didn’t pass its physical” or as “meatloaf that missed basic training.”

George Hormel’s son, Jay Hormel served in World War I. In response to complaints from U.S. service members during World War II, Jay Hormel would say: “If they think Spam is terrible, they ought to have eaten the bully beef we had in the last war.”

Bully beef (corned beef) in a tin and hardtack biscuits were the main field rations of the British Army in World War I and shared with the American troops in Europe.

Erin DeJesus of Eater.com, an online food and dining network, said Hormel’s wartime role continued in Korea and Vietnam. Today, major markets for Spam include South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Guam (a U.S. territory in the western Pacific Ocean) and Hawaii.

Hormel’s international “Spambassador” is a chap named Chris Stephens, a delivery truck driver in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, in the United Kingdom. He eats Spam every day and has been doing so for more than 60 years.

“I love the unique flavor and would eat multiple cans a day but my wife has put me on a diet recently, so I’ve cut down to one tub per day,” Stephens said.

Stephens said he enjoys traveling, but he only selects hotels that offer frying facilities, so he can get his daily fix of Spam. “Give me Spam above the best beef or lobster any day,” he declared.