Savor Classics: Spam Uncanned

The story of Spam is one of war and peace, nostalgia and necessity, all-American innovation and greed. In this classic episode, Spammy Reese and Lauren Vogelspam explore the history and science behind Spam.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to Savior Prediction of iHeartRadio. I'm Annie
Reese and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we have a
classic episode for you about spam. Mmmmm, it was a
fun one. Oh yeah, oh well, I being fun fun
and there's a there's a lot of kill joy in
the history section. But h But otherwise, other than the

(00:30):
labor practices, delightful. Yeah, the festival I remember fondly. Yeah, sure, yes,
And as I've mentioned recently, I have spam currently. I've
made spam subia a couple of times. I feel like
I'm getting it down. Yeah, like not hard. It's not
the easiest thing either. Sure well, the correct rice texture

(00:55):
can be tricky and yeah, um yeah, well that would
be a whole other thing. But it is delicious and
I do have some. I'm intending to make some again
soon because I thought craving for it lately. Okay, yeah,
I I also have a can I've been kind of

(01:15):
putting off, going like, oh, I'm gonna have a day
when I'm gonna really want that. So yes, yeah, and
how far we have come since March of twenty eighteen,
when this episode originally aired. Because I don't think you
would ever knowingly had spam at that point, and you know,
since then, um, you know, we went to Hawaii. We

(01:36):
discussed it in our holiday marketing bonus this best December.
You've made your own spam Masubium. But yeah, while we
were out in in in Hawaii, we definitely had some spam.
I think spamassubi was one of the very first things
that you had on the island. Oh yeah, I mean
it was a very like we got to the hotel

(01:58):
and we saw a convenience store and we were all like,
let's go go, and it's one of the things they
offered there, which was amazing. Oh yeah, yeah, And there's
definitely at least one plate of locomoco it's consumed. Oh
at least I think several, but at least one. So good.
And furthermore, like like so many of y'all after this

(02:22):
episode originally aired, wrote in I mean like physically sometimes
about spam along with some like spam postcards and various
weird merchandise and trinkets. I this one sparked some enthusiasm.
It certainly did, and in fact, this is probably this

(02:47):
is probably largely related to the job that we do.
I just got a Google Update alert that was like, hey,
spam is cool again. I was all right, okay, I
don't know that a wasn't cool for some people, but
all right, sure, sure, all right, I were good for it. Yeah,

(03:11):
I'm sure. I will say that spams sales have spiked,
or I mean, did did spike during the early pandemic.
They were up about twenty eight percent by September of
twenty twenty. I think that's versus the previous year, and
it was not just a pandemic fluke like perhaps as
a as a larger economic trend and probably a negative

(03:34):
sign of the times. By the end of twenty twenty one,
spam sales had been rising and like rising at record
rates for seven years in a row. Wow. Yeah again,
I guess good first spam. Um. It might mean that
a lot of us are in dire financial straits, but

(03:56):
good first spam, good first, which from what we understand
as an excellent museum. Um. Oh yeah, I still have
not been Still want to go same hard, same Yes, Well,
I guess we should let past Annie and Lauren take
it away. Hello and welcome to food stuff. I'm Annies

(04:30):
and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And today we're talking about spam.
Spam and not the email kind, although briefly, yeah, just
a little bit about that, but mostly the canned meat product,
which you probably knew because you're listening to a podcast
about food. Probably, I don't know. We could go real
a wall with our with our talk. We could, and
I kind of want to one day. I think we'd

(04:53):
get a lot of angry emails, though, I think we would. Um,
but so stuff. Evenston History class already has a whole
episode about this. Thank you. If you would like to
hear their take on it, and I suspect that you would,
you can go listen. Yes, Um, what are what are
your thoughts experiences with spam? Lauren? Um? I didn't grow
up like like, no one in my family started to

(05:14):
me growing up. But I had a friend um in college,
who would would serve it like like slice slices of
it fried and then start into like mac and cheese
or something like that, and it's like salty and delicious.
For her. It was a nostalgia thing. Uh huh, Yeah,
I get that. I get the feeling. Nostalgia is very
much involved in a lot of oh yeah, yeah, oh

(05:35):
hugely yeah, because because okay, So so what about you, though, Um,
I'm not sure I've ever had it. I I know
I took my little brother to a restaurant in San
Francisco called LeHo LeHo Yacht Cup, which has a lot
of spam items on the menu, So I might have
had it, but I've never knowingly had it. Yeah, you've

(05:56):
never gotten like, oh man, what I'm doing right now
is eating spam exactly. Okay, So what is spam? Oh
that's a great question, isn't it. Spam is a canned
luncheon meat product. Lunch and meat is the legal term
for a cured cooked meat food product that consists of

(06:16):
common uned meat plus some reasonable portion of flavorings, preservatives,
and binding agents, all mixed together and molded into a
loaf for slicing and serving. A loaf. A loaf yes
common uned, by the way, means pulverized, as in reduced
to fragments, and in the case of spam, that luncheon

(06:37):
meat is made up of, it's a mixture of things
of pork meats, modified potato, starch, salt, sugar water, and
sodium nitrate for color. Ah Sodonum nitrate is what gives
some preserved meats their distinctive pink color. It's also in
there for preservation. Spam is shelf stable. No refrigeration is
required as long as the can is sealed, and that

(06:59):
can can last years past its best by date and
like technically indefinitely. So in the apocalypse zombies are about,
I'm searching for food. Yeah, spam, it says many years
date past, but it was just disregard. It might taste
a little bit off, but I'll never know about it. Yeah.

(07:20):
Hormel says that spam is like meat with a pause button. Oh,
that's kind of creative. Yeah, if I appreciate it. The
recipe for spam has remained pretty much unchanged since its inception,
apart from the addition of that potato starch in two
thousand and nine to keep Oh they are of gelatin
from forming on the top when you cook it. To

(07:41):
someone who's never had it or seen it, that is
so fascinating to me. Oh yeah. The name itself stands
for scientifically processed and will matter. Or perhaps that is
just a fun myth. It probably is because Hormel the person,
not the company, but the company named after Hormel. Anyway,
he claims it was a combination of spice and ham,

(08:02):
the result of a naming contest with a one hundred
dollar reward. All of these naming contests, I know, Okay,
I haven't heard about any of these. I did get
in on that the prize winner is said to have
been an actor by the name of Kenneth Dagnall, whose
brother was once a vice president at Hormel. So some
nepotism maybe, okay. Is at the time that one hundred

(08:23):
dollars would have been equivalent to about fifteen hundred dollars.
That's nothing, No, certainly not. You can now get spam
of the oven roasted turkey variety, Spam, hot and spicy,
Spam light with fifty percent less fat, Spam with bacon
all right, Spam, karaoke spam, jalapeno and spam spread for
all your spreading. Spam needs talk twisters perfect. There are

(08:50):
two facilities in the US that produce the stuff, Austin, Minnesota,
not Texas, and Fremont, Nebraska. And that's it. It is
a distinctly and very recognizably American brand slash product. Yes,
nutrition wise, spam is high in protein and low in carbs,
but it's also really high in saturated fats. It's almost

(09:13):
eighty percent fat. Oh, just a two ounce serving has
about a quarter of your daily recommended intake of fat
for a two thousand calorie per day average diet. It's
also really high in salt. So if you need to
watch those things, I would say to treat spam as
a treat. Yes, absolutely, Yeah. Though, Hey, if you've ever
heard that lunch meats and other preserved meats and even

(09:35):
preserved cheeses like American cheese are bad for you because
they contain these antimicrobial preservatives like sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite,
well that's not actually generally why preserved meats are bad
for you see above reading salt and fat content. But
studies show that nitrates and nitrites can form other compounds

(09:56):
in the body, some of which can cause cancer. But
nitrates are common in many leafy greens and our water supply,
and even in our own bodies, and they might be
helpful in preventing heart disease. And you can help prevent
them from forming those carcinogetic compounds by eating vitamin C
along with them, which is why the USDA requires processed
meats that use them also include vitamin C in their recipes.

(10:19):
Oh really, and laws in most places prevent very much
of them from being used in the first place. So
I mean, like, yeah, like, don't go crazy with the
cheese Whiz, but you know, don't worry too much about
nitrates or nitrites. No. Did there are two bottles of
cheese Whiz in our office kitchen? Are there? Why? I
thought you brought them soon with you? Ah? The spray cheese? No,

(10:42):
no, no no, no, what I'm talking about. When I talk
about cheese Whiz, I talk about the canned stuff, the jars.
There's so there's a difference between spray cheese and canned cheese. Oh. Absolutely,
you have so much to teach me, Laura. I cannot
wait to do an episode on fake cheese. You have
been talking about that for a while. Okay, all right,
maybe it's going into our into our list today. All right,

(11:04):
we'll find out. Anyway. Since it came onto the food
scene in nineteen thirty seven, courtesy of the Hormel Corporation,
more than eight billion cans have been sold. While it
is an American icon, and I saw it described that
way in several articles, I'm not coining that term It's
available in forty four countries around the world, and Tormel
licenses the name and recipe to other producers outside of

(11:26):
the United States. As of twenty seventeen, they estimated that
the twelve point eight cans of spam are consumed every
second across the planet every second. Who It's fairly cheap,
which means during times of economic difficulty, spam sees and
uptick in sales. In the two thousand and eight recession,
this equated to a ten percent increase in sales in

(11:49):
the US. Probably no surprise. So why tops the list
in spam consumption with an average three pounds per person
a year or seven million cans a year for an
island with population of one point four two million. So
you can do some math therapy. You would like McDonald's
menus and who I have spam based products for McDonald's

(12:09):
fact of the episode. Yes, okay, so if you're going
to make yourself a quick breakfast, you wouldn't do yourself
wrong with the Filipino spam salogue and the apologies. My
tagalog is really terrible. So um, so if I'm mispronouncing
everything right in and tell me that I'm a bad person.
It's okay, no, don't do that. I don't know if

(12:33):
you are going to hear that, but that was producer
Dylan being like terrified for me. I don't, okay, don't,
don't write it and tell me that I'm a terrible person.
But but you know you feel free to correct me gently.
I won't. I won't be offendiftable if you have if
you want to send in a voye anyway, okay. So so,
spam salogue is a partman teau for um, a dish
of garlic fried rice which is um synangag and a

(12:56):
fried egg a putong it log serve with slices of
pan fried spam, frequently with a fresh tomato or cucumber
on the side. So yeah, garlic fried rice, spam slices
fried fried egg sounds great. Yes, There are, of course,
multiple spam festivals. There are, of course there are. There's

(13:17):
the Spam Jam in Waikiki, with music and tastings from
local restaurants and all kinds of anthropomorphic costumed spam characters
that you can get your photo taken with. There's another
Spam Jam in Austin, Minnesota, the birthplace of spam, where
there's also a Spam Museum across the river from the
main plant, where former factory workers are spambassadors for visitors.

(13:40):
We will be talking a bit more about that town
in a minute, but I've got a lot of questions.
Just I'm just curious, Like, is the whole town spam
I listeners, please send pictures if you have them. Yeah,
it sounds very intense. I it does from from what
I understand, like the like the business of the town

(14:01):
is this Hormil factory. So yeah. Um, there's also another
spam festival in um is Latin is Latin Aisleton, California.
I'm so sorry, feelings, but they've got a spamley cup
cooking competition. Goodness. Yeah, the puns keep rolling in and

(14:21):
then of course an annual uh there are annual spam
carving slash sculpting contests in a few places, with a
particularly a large one in Seattle. Oh man, let us
if you've been send photos, please please please, Speaking of
a spam fandom spammedom. Oh yeah. There's an English fellow

(14:44):
who legally got his name his middle name changed to
I Love Spam. His name therefore is Mark I Love
Spam Benson. He got the Queen's permission. He got the
queen's permission. It's on his passport and everything. Did he
go up to the queen and said, your majesty. I
didn't hear what the process was. But in twenty seventeen,

(15:07):
he and his wife were married in the Spam Museum
in Austin, Minnesota. She said, when his obsession came to light,
I had already fallen in love with him. Oh, Hormel
financially helped the couple make this whole dream come true,
and then sent them to the Spam Jam in Waikiki
for their honeymoon. Well, that's lovely. I'm trying to think

(15:28):
of like instances where this middle name thing is gonna
throw a wrench in some kind of situation. But I
hope not. I all the best for you, right, I mean,
what are his initials? Now? Am I ls B? Or
is it am I b oh man in black? Okay?
I need to focus, I need to refocus. Okay. Yes.

(15:50):
A nineteen forty five New Yorker piece on Jay Hormel
came with this quote from the author. I got the
distinct impression that being responsible for spam might be too
great a burden on any one man. Yeah, Hormel allegedly
went back and forth between distancing himself and the company
from spam and then rushing to its defense. He couldn't

(16:11):
decide what his thoughts were, his product, where his heart
lay or lied. Oh I'm doing great today. Yeah, and okay,
this is clearly a very nostalgic food for a lot
of people. Well, we'll get into that in a minute.
We're also going to get into some really upsetting stuff.
So that's all great. Yeah, yeah, But in the meantime, yeah,

(16:33):
let's pause for a quick break for a word from
our sponsor. Yay, and we're back. Thank you sponsor. Yes,
thank you. So I wanted to start out it's not
related directly to spam. But in eighteen thirteen new technology

(16:54):
for preserving food by canning was commercialized in England and
one of the first products can and was meat to
be sent to the British Navy. Makes sense if we
look at spam's history in particular. In eighteen ninety one,
a fellow named George A. Hormel that Hormel laid the

(17:15):
foundation for his first combination meat packing facility and slaughterhouse
in a small town under twelve square miles called Austin, Minnesota.
He got his start working in a Chicago slaughterhouse, but
he wanted to set out and to his own thing.
A decade later, in nineteen oh one, George A. Hormel

(17:36):
and Co. Was officially incorporated, making beef, sausage, casings and
whole hogs, and Hormel continued working the butchery line himself,
splitting the first one hundred thousand pig carcasses, which is
apparently one of the more difficult parts of the process.
I couldn't believe that. And back to you awesome Minnesota
for a minute. It would go on to be known

(17:58):
as Spamtown, USA, complete with Spam Boulevard, the Spam Museum,
as we've mentioned in a restaurant called Johnny's Spam Arema.
And yes, please, we can't reiterate enough. We need to
see evidence of this. Listeners, you've got to send us pictures. Anyway.
Back to Hormel. After fighting in World War One, Jay

(18:20):
Hormel took over as president of the company, and his
father said in nineteen twenty nine, Jay Hormel wanted to
come up with a product that was essentially the home
version of canned lunch meats. You'd order from Delhi Counters.
There is no one person we can point to from
Hormel as the inventor of spam, but we can't point
to an employee by the name of Julius Ziljit and

(18:42):
he did the first test with the twelve ounce can.
Along with his team. He figured out that canning the
meat in a vacuum keep the product from getting all sweaty,
which is not a thing you want. Nope, not at all. No.
At the time, it was the height of the Great Depression,
and the idea was to find a way to use
are wise unsellable cut of meat, the pork shoulder the

(19:03):
pork in the first iterations of spam, where this cut
generally still are today. Over the next few years, there
was this rising discontent in the Hormel factory, which came
to a head when Jay tried to enforce a twenty
cent per week employee contribution to this company wide insurance fund,
which the company would also pay into like at five

(19:23):
times that amount, which sounds great until you get to
the enforce part. The already frustrated and underpaid employees organized
a union and then a strike. In nineteen thirty three,
they shut down plant operations and even the refrigeration system.
Like millions of dollars worth of mute were on the line.
The situation was resolved without even having to call in
state hired militia, which was on the table, and over

(19:45):
the next couple of years, Jay Hormel got back in
good with his employees by offering all these really progressive
salary wage systems and profit sharing and merit pay, all
leading to pretty good financial success for the company and
also him being called a red capitalist by Fortune magazine.
My brain is like compliment, insult, insult communism. Oh okay,

(20:09):
I see yeah, because of the red Yeah, all right.
On July fifth, nineteen thirty seven, Spam hit the grocery
store shelves. The name was trademarked earlier that same year,
and one of their first slogans was cold a Hut.
Spam hits the spot. I love it, very crisp. Yes.
By the nineteen thirties, people were familiar with canned meats

(20:29):
that didn't need refrigeration, But it was World War Two
that really catapult to spam to the public eye so
necessarily in a good way. When it was one of
the brands of canned meats. The US military purchased and
shipped to the soldiers overseas, both American and Allied forces,
to the tune of one hundred million pounds or maybe
a hundred million cans. Yeah, history history. According to our

(20:52):
very own website How Stuff Works, not too many soldiers
actually were eating the real thing, really spam. More likely
they were eating meat the government provide to Hermel and
other companies for canning, which just seems unfair to spam
in a weird way. But you know, in nineteen forty
one of the first singing ads was for spam, and
then keep up with the singing is a marketing tactic.

(21:14):
After the war, there was a whole radio show called
Music with the Hormel Girls. Oh I'm sure it was
a little light, But the soldiers weren't exactly thrilled with spam,
to be fair, they were sometimes eating it three meals
a day, and that's a lot of any kind of
food to not get a bit tired of it, I
would agree. Yes, Hormel kept this girl as file of

(21:34):
hate mail the company received from American soldiers. Some of
their opinions meet loaf without basic training, ham that didn't
pass its physical and the real reason war was hell yeah, strong,
strong words. This is one of the reasons you said.
It was a lot of responsibility for one man. Ah,

(21:55):
this is hate mail he was receiving. Margaret Thatcher, though
apparently called it a wartime delicacy. I don't know that,
Oh Thatcher. Since spam had a long shelf life and
could survive pretty much anything though weather throughout it, it
made its way to islands that might have trouble otherwise
importing food during the war, like England or the Asian

(22:17):
Pacific in Hawaii. As the war ended and soldiers returned,
they were not about eating any more spam. Starting with
the sixties, spam transitioned from the main source of protein
to kind of a supporting act, like a sandwich component
or with eggs. A recipe from the sixties included it
spam upside down pie. Oh my brain was trying to

(22:41):
imagine that as I was saying, and it was not good.
Not good. But this wasn't the case everywhere. No, the
Asian Pacific and Hawaii experienced the opposite, as spam rose
and popularity after the war. This was in part because
of sanctions the US government put on fishing industries that
were largely owned by Japanese Americans. Ah With fish off

(23:01):
the menu, Hawaiian's turned spam for starving Japanese and Koreans.
Spam included in aid packages could very well have been
a lifesaver. During the Korean War, soldiers likely consumed something
called army stew, which was a simmered broth of canned
meats like spam and spices. To this day, Korea is

(23:22):
spam's second largest market. It's even given as a gift
during Lunar New Year. We didn't read across that in
our Lunar New Year research, but that's very very interesting. Yes,
spam got a culinary boost as Koreans and Japanese immigrated
to why after World War Two and the fusion of
cuisine's birth dishes like Lokomoco. The billionth can of spam

(23:46):
was sold in nineteen fifty nine, and that brings us
to a pop culture phenomenon, a what's a good word
for it, Lauren paradigm shift? It's okay. So in nineteen seven,
Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted. They're spam sketched with vikings
in a cafe because Monty Python drowning out the customers

(24:08):
and owners voices with their song about spam, Lovely Spam,
Lovely Spam, and the end credits for the episode include
Spam with every company member including Spam Terry Jones and
Terry Spam, sausage, Spam, egg spam, Gilliam. Oh that's excellent. Yeah,
and this skit is pretty much where the term spam
in context to email comes from. Oh really, yeah, because

(24:31):
you know it's the spam email. It's omnipresent, it has
no appreciable content. Yeah, it drowns out other voices. Okay, yeah,
makes sense. Yeah. Um. Horbell is not really excited about
this association. No. I think they tried to find a
way to legally do something about it. I don't know.

(24:53):
I remember reading an article where they were pursuing solutions
sort but sorry about it. Yeah, I mean, if it's
any constellation, which I'm sure it's not, I don't think of,
Like I don't associate the two. Yeah, like they mean
such different things. Yeah, Brian, that yeah, that's just me maybe. Yeah.
And that brings us to nineteen eighty five and another

(25:14):
strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. Over the
sixties and seventies, employee satisfaction had been on the rise,
but this article that I read about the nineteen thirty
three strike ended this way. Most workers in the prospering
Hormel company in the nineteen sixties and seventies who remembered
or read about the history of their union concluded that

(25:35):
the hard times were behind them. They should be forgiven
for entertaining that illusion. That does not sound good. Nope.
By nineteen seventy five, the company had fallen out of
the Hormel family's hands and the new leadership was not
as great. They were using the promise of building this
new state of the art labor conditions improving plant to

(25:58):
kind of let the union in, let them destroy worker benefits,
especially for the butchery end of the business, and Hormel
enacted a twenty three percent wage drop on top of that.
Starting in August of nineteen eighty five, the union workers
walked out and stayed out for thirteen months. National Guard
had to be called in to protect workers who crossed

(26:19):
the picket lines and to break up roadblocks. Wow. Eventually,
the national union that had been supporting this local branch
dropped them, thus effectively ending the strike. The company was
able to hire people back at just a penny per hour,
more than that twenty three percent wage drop rate, and
would begin hiring a lot of immigrants with perhaps less

(26:40):
than scrupulously checked documentation who are willing to work for
those lower wages. In nineteen eighty seven, Hormel leased off
the butchery side of its Austin plant to a third
party company, or a third party on paper anyway. The
new company was Quality Pork Processors Incorporated, which exclusively purchased
Hormel owned hugs and exclusively sold the processed meat back

(27:03):
to Hormel, all using the space and the machines that
currently belonged to Hormel and were housed in the same
plant right. This led to another year long strike, but
the union eventually settled, and as subcontractors, QPP could hire
a workforce at lower wages than those that Hormel had

(27:24):
furnished to their unionized workers. In nineteen ninety one, the
first Spam museum opened in Austin. It would be revamped
in two thousand and one and twenty sixteen. Oh yeah,
and in nineteen ninety five. Spam has sponsored a car
in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. A couple of years later,
in nineteen ninety eight, the Smithsonian received a spam tin donation.

(27:48):
During the recession in the two thousand oats, spam sales
and production increased, with employees being offered as much overtime
as they could handle. Spam spam has been called an
economic indicator as we meant and earlier for its predictable
increase in sales during rough financial times, and this production
increase led to a really tragic series of nerve damage

(28:10):
related disabilities in QPP butcher workers. This was actually sort
of a landmark medical discovery. I remember reading about it
during a previous gig copy editing medical journal articles. But yes,
we welcome again to Lauren's Kiljoy corner. Okay. So, the
way that large scale pig butchering works is that different

(28:30):
parts of the animal would be dealt with by skilled
workers and or particular machinery in different rooms. All parts
of the meat are separated from the bones for use.
Everything on the pig is edible. The brain, which is
shipped to Asia for use as a thickening agent, used
to be removed from the skull cavity with this high
pressure jet of water which sort of liquefies the tissues

(28:51):
that it can be collected. Part of that liquid sort
of air solises due to the high pressure used in
getting it out, and the workers in that part of
the factory, that the head part would breathe in a
whole bunch of it and more of it, more and
more of it as the line speed increased from handling
nine hundred heads per hour in nineteen ninety six to

(29:11):
one thousand, three hundred and fifty per hour in two
thousand and six. And okay, when when you breathe in
foreign particles that your body's like, this doesn't belong here,
your your immune system. The workers immune systems were doing
what they were supposed to do. They were attacking the
particles and remembering to attack similar particles later. Unfortunately, human

(29:34):
nerve cells and pig nerve cells are similar enough that
these workers started developing an autoimmune condition where their immune
system was attacking their own nerves, causing eventual loss of
fine motor skills and fatigue and other sometimes permanent symptoms.
That's awful, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sucks. And QPP working

(29:54):
again inside the Hormail facility, but without Hormail's better worker
compensation and protection packages, did not really handle it well.
They did stop harvesting brains, but evidence collected for an
expose in Mother Jones suggests that they silenced the injured
workers by threatening their jobs or their integration status. And then,

(30:16):
oh boy, keeps going high. It does. In twenty fifteen,
QPP was embroiled in an animal cruelty scandal when a
video of poor conditions on the killing floor was leaked,
apparently by employees. The Food Safety and Inspection Services Administration
also collected evidence that the space was not in compliance
with federal regulations. However, neither the county nor the USDA

(30:38):
took further action, and in twenty seventeen, a state court
denied an advocacy group a search warrant of the QPP
facilities on the grounds that their leads were too old.
Leads were too old. Yeah, this is ongoing, but as
of twenty seventeen, there are a bunch of headlines about
spam making like a trendy comeback with poshs that are

(31:00):
tapping into that fun feeling of nostalgia. Isn't nostalgia great?
I love I love nostalgia. That's my favorite. Well that's uh,
the end of Laurens killjoy Corner for now. Yes, so
we were. We still have some more science to talk about.
We do, and that part's kind of great. Yes, first,

(31:23):
one last quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back. Thank you sponsored, Yes, thank you. Um So,
Spam for all of those other things that I just said,

(31:43):
is an amazing edible science experiment. In order to create
a stable loaf cheaply and consistently, you, as Annie said earlier,
mix the meat in a vacuum. Vacuum, seal it into cans,
and then you cook the whole cans. You cook it
in the you cook it in the cans. Oh wow
really yeah? Yeah, Otherwise the meat, if you don't do

(32:04):
it in that way, the meat will break down during
cooking and you're left with just this small loaf and
a lot of like juice and or gelatin. Yeah. But
before you even get there, you've got to find a
way to prepare the meat. Spam uses shoulder meat mixed
with a little buck slash thigh meat that might be
cured and flavored, otherwise known as ham. Theat shoulder meat
is inexpensive because it's such a pain in the ham

(32:26):
to debone. Hormel does it by putting the shoulders through
a hydraulic press that squeezes the meat off the bone.
The meat is ground and measured for fat consistency, then
mixed with the other ingredients and thousand pound batches cannot comprehend, Nope.
The cans are then cooked in a hydrostatic cooker, which

(32:47):
is it's so cool or it's hot first but then cool.
It consists of at least four towers that are stacked
vertically and kind of bring cans up and then down
in this sort of like like half loop. Okay, so
you've got four towers. At least, you've got a steam
tower that holds pressurized saturated steam at the temperature that

(33:11):
you want to cook the cans at. Then you've got
two warm water filled towers on either end of the
steam tower, which brings your cans up near to cooking
temperature and then back down out of it. And also
this is the cool part keeps the steam tower pressurized
at the same time physics. Then you've got a cooling

(33:32):
tower that uses a cool water sprays to bring the
cans safely back to like processing temperature. Setups can also
have a preheating and multiple cooking and cooling towers or
sections and I'm not totally positive what Hormel uses. It
says They're setup has eleven chambers that the cans move
vertically through, with the whole thing being six stories tall
and capable of processing sixty six thousand cans over the

(33:54):
span of two hours. My brain, I don't know how
much more it can take. Laurence. After it comes out
of that process, the cans are labeled, packed, and eventually
shipped out. That is pretty cool. Yeah, this is another
This is another episode that I was like, oh, oh,
this is Oh, I don't know, I don't know if

(34:15):
I can buy that product anymore. Yeah, I really want
to try lokomoko. This is the challenge. Just yeah, I
wonder if there's a different I mean, there are plenty
of There are definitely plenty of like canned meat products
out there. It's it's all about, I mean, you know,
find finding someone that does something more more ethically hopefully.

(34:37):
And I guess that's kind of like the like slightly
feel good takeaway lesson of this, Like when something is
that cheap, there is a cost somewhere, yes to someone. Yeah,
And so our co worker Bimbolon wrote an excellent short story.
It's published somewhere. I can't recall where, but I think
it's some Southern writing magazine. Oh cool. And I just

(34:59):
remember it so well because it was all about a
consumer just reaching foreign orange. But he was telling it
based on like the consumers reaching for the orange, and
then it was sort of what went into getting that
orange to you, and he was describing just like the
working conditions and the death so that it took to
and you were making a choice based on price. But

(35:20):
on the other side of it, there's all there's all
of stuff, and it's stuck with me. I read it
years ago and I still think about, Wow, it's very good. Um,
maybe maybe we can ask him and we can post
it somewhere. Yeah, we'll see about that. And before we
closed out this episode, I have two notes Lauren, okay, okay.
The first is mid episode, we had kind of a
crisis of foodstuff crisis where we realized we're not entirely

(35:41):
sure how to pronounced from Hormel. Yeah. I thought that
I read somewhere during our research that it's Hormel and wait,
and I still saying that's the same way I think
you said Hormle. Yeah. Yeah, but we've been saying Hormel. Anyway,
we were covered and soldiered on because we found no
evidence to suggest otherwise. But we did have him Many crisis. Yeah.

(36:01):
And the other thing is I another many crisis I've
realized is we should have introduced ourselves with spam names.
And I'm not willing to go back and rerecord the
end show, but I should have said, Lauren Vogel spam
my name doesn't really lend itself as well. But Bammy rees, yes, okay,

(36:24):
I can dig it. Okay, I can dig it, And
that brings us to the end of this classic episode.
We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we
enjoyed doing it. And yes, if you have any I
mean we both have some spam. So oh yeah, if
you have a recipe that absolutely needs our attention, yeah,

(36:44):
you send it in, yes please. You can do that
at hello at saborpod dot com, which is our email.
Uh huh. We are also on social media. You can
find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at savor pod,
and we do hope to hear from you. Savor is
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, you

(37:06):
can visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Thanks us always to our
superproducers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
your way.