When I was working for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn in the early 1980s, my colleague Tom O’Boyle thought about writing a quirky story about Spam, the canned ham. He’d heard that Germans loved the stuff. We were baffled by its popularity in a country where every corner grocery was resplendent with fresh pork products.
O’Boyle never wrote the story, but since then I have gathered string on the cultural hegemony of Spam. It’s very big: Since its invention in 1937, six billion cans have been sold in 46 countries and Americans alone buy 90 million cans a year.
I also learned that America sent Spam to help feed the Allied soldiers during World War II. The U.S. government sent all sorts of food, including other canned luncheon meats, but Spam got all the glory, perhaps because the name is both easy to remember and to pronounce. Say it out loud. The word bursts off the tongue in a satisfying explosion of consonants.
Nikita Khrushchev mentioned it in his taped reminiscences, published as Khrushchev Remembers. “We had lost our fertile, food-bearing lands,” he said. “Without Spam we wouldn’t have been able to feed our armies.” A grocer’s daughter, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, tongue in cheek and nostalgic at the same time, called Spam a wartime delicacy.
It is no coincidence that a British comedy troupe, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, would crack wise over the ubiquity of Spam. In one famous routine, two guys at a restaurant try to order breakfast from a menu in which the processed meat product is featured in almost every dish. This wildly popular sketch poking fun at Spam overload would lead cyber-neologists to give fresh meaning to the word: the unwelcome barrage of junk mail into individual email accounts.
As for the Germans, they developed their attachment to Spam when it arrived as humanitarian aid from the U.S. after the war. While not as consequential as the Marshall Plan, Spam is affectionately remembered as a symbol of U.S. beneficence amid de-Nazification.
The food historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto calls this phenomenon “Colonial circulation”: the exchange of foods over long distances as the result of empire building, military occupations, and other cultural collisions. “Hunger, of course, or some analogous emergency such as war, can dispose people to accept foods which in other circumstances they might reject as foreign,” he writes in his book Near a Thousand Tables.
This culinary cross-pollination goes both ways. Gummi Bears are a case in point. The German company Haribo, which first manufactured the gelatin-based candy in the 1920s, credits German teachers in the United States for giving American kids their first taste of the chewy, whimsical sweet. But soldiers and their families living on bases in Germany were also on the front lines, developing a taste for the local confection and taking it stateside as gifts. The candy became popular enough through these informal channels that an American company, Herman Goelitz, began manufacturing Gummi Bears in 1981 and Haribo ramped up the distribution of its Gold-Bears shortly after.
Now I cannot help but wonder: Did GIs who served in Japan whet America’s new appetite for sushi?
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Comments
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
Makes me wonder how much of the market for Spam is now overseas. It's very popular in the South Pacific, I believe (as it is in Hawaii). World War II again, probably. But I haven't seen it on a menu here since I had it for lunch in grade school 40 years ago.
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
This makes me wonder how much of the total market for Spam today is overseas. I know it's very popular in the South Pacific (and on Hawaii)--WWII again, I suppose. But I haven't seen Spam on a US menu since I had it in the cafeteria in grade school 40 years ago.
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
Fascinating. One wonders how the Iraq war would have played out had US troops shocked and awed Iraqis with Pringles and Pepsis.
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
Tim, I asked Hormel for some additional data and the company quickly obliged. Actually the US market still dominates: More than 122 million cans of Spam are sold worldwide, 90 million in the U.S. alone, according to a company fact sheet. I don't know how much of that market share is due to Hawaii's high Spam consumption--it has the most sales in the U.S. per capita -- but I would venture to say quite a lot.
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
Interesting story...I remember there was a Spam Jam restaurant in the Philippines in 2004. After I left, not sure if the restaurant still exists. But I still like spam and my daughter likes spam and rice :D
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
Funny you should mention sushi, as the National Post recently featured a recipe for homemade sushi made with Spam, to commemorate the opening of "Spamalot" in Toronto:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2008/08/29/spam-sushi-heralds-the-return-of-monty-python-s-spamalot.aspx
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
In California there are a few restaurants, besides Hawaiian food chain L&L BBQ, that offer SPAM on their menu. You can get SPAM fried rice, SPAM musubi, SPAM in place of other pork breakfast foods with your eggs and rice.
Another question that comes to mind along the same line as the one about GI's in Japan and sushi is whether GI's in Vietname the seed for the wave of restaurants serving pho or banh mi. And what food(s) might be introduced to America from the current troop deployments in the Middle East?
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
In California there are a few restaurants, besides Hawaiian food chain L&L BBQ, that offer SPAM on their menu. You can get SPAM fried rice, SPAM musubi, SPAM in place of other pork breakfast foods with your eggs and rice.
Another question that comes to mind along the same line as the one about GI's in Japan and sushi is whether GI's in Vietname the seed for the wave of restaurants serving pho or banh mi. And what food(s) might be introduced to America from the current troop deployments in the Middle East?
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
http://spam.ytmnd.com/
I just assumed "I don't like Spam." But after reading your blog, I think I will try it.
I do like Gummi Bears. Did you know you can buy them by the ton now in the cafeteria? Better than Green Fridays!!
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
This is a very interesting topic that has never crossed my mind, I will definately try it. Thank you for sharing the information.
Aug 13, 2008 3PM #
Geography has been the most important factor that determines the type of food people consume. The availability of edible stuff is practically solely controlled by the environment.
Naturally, history and religions play an essential part in influencing the kind of food to eat or to avoid (so do culture and beliefs). Certain diet which serves as a delicious cuisine to one tribe or ethnic group may well be frowned upon by another in a different location.
Globalization contributes in making our world without borders, helping the spread of food of most nationalities to every corner. In many places (especially the big cities) we are able to taste the best of menu from all over the world without venturing far.
Food, more, more! Does that not sound familiar?
(Tan Boon Tee)
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