March 19, 2020 • 27 mins
Back in 2014, we tackled SPAM's story. This famous Hormel Foods product was invented in the 1930s to make use of a surplus of shoulder meat from pigs. It played a huge role in WWII, and shaped the cuisines of many Pacific Island nations.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen,
and that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, do you remember
(00:46):
recently on our Facebook page and we had that weird
influx of self published book spam? Yeah, Like suddenly just
tons of posts were showing up of people promoting their
self published books that off I had nothing to do
with history. No, none of them. And that was the
only thing and they had in common was that none
of them were about history. Otherwise they were by different people,
(01:08):
they were posted from different accounts, they were in different genres.
It was very strange, and because I was wondering, maybe,
you know, maybe there had been some article that had
gotten passed around that was like to promote your e
book post on random people's Facebook pages. I posted on
our Facebook page to say sort of, hey listeners, any
of you have any idea why this might be happening. Um.
(01:31):
A couple of people really went out of their way
to yell at us and call us idiots for even
asking that question. Most people kind of shrugged their shoulders
virtually about it. A few people gave us suggestions, were
trying to like track down exactly what was going on,
but a couple of people said, you know it would
be cool is if you did an episode about spam
(01:52):
the food. Not spam like the unwanted e communication, but
spam the food. And I can get behind that because
I will loudly and proudly say I quite enjoy spam. Yeah.
Well uh, And immediately from just the few facts that
I already knew about spam's influence on various cuisines in
(02:14):
the wake of World War Two, I was like, Yeah,
let's do that. That sounds actually pretty interesting and awesome.
And then that led to several other people chiming in
with interesting tidbits about spam and history. So that is
what we were talking about today. Thank you random people
who put their weird e books on our Facebook page.
It was a secuitous journey, but we got to a
(02:34):
cool episode idea and I like sharing the journeys. Sometimes
a lot of times people ask us how we come
up with these things. Well that's an example. So yes,
today we were going to talk about spam's history and
how spam played a part in some pretty important historical events,
namely World War two and the Korean War. YA. So
(02:57):
in case anyone does not know, spam is made by
Hormel Foods. George A. Hormel was born in eighteen sixty
in Buffalo, New York. Now, their last name was originally
pronounced Hormal to rhyme with normal, and it's not totally
clear when Hormel became hormel Um because we've both been
saying Hormel all our lives, and for the sake of consistency,
(03:20):
we're just gonna go with Hormel. That was definitely what
the company was calling itself by the time spam was invented.
So the Hormel family moved to Toledo, Ohio when George
was just six, and he worked in his father's tannery
after school. The Panic of eighteen seventy three meant that
the family found itself needing additional income, so at the
(03:42):
age of twelve, George left school so that he could
spend more time working and make more money for the family.
After a few brief stints and a couple of other jobs,
he wound up working at his uncle's meat packing business,
and he worked there until he was nineteen, and George
continued to work in different jobs throughout his young adulthood.
He was working as a traveling salesman when he found
(04:04):
a meat shop for sale in Austin, Minnesota, where he
was passing through while he was doing some business in
his sales and he bought this meat shop and he
opened it, putting his experience at his uncle's meat packing
operation into practice and opening his own meat business. Soon
he really wanted the business to be more than just
a butcher's shop, so he borrowed some money, found an investor,
(04:27):
and established George A. Hormel and Company. The George was
just G. E O with period after it, and they
operated out of an abandoned creamery that was in and
at that point he was thirty one years old. All
of the United States biggest meat packing operations were in Chicago,
and here he was in Austin, Minnesota, hundreds of miles
(04:49):
away from that sort of nexus of industry, and he
was also brand new. He was a small business in
an industry that at that point was completely dominated by
really established, long time powerhouses. And he also didn't actually
have some of the equipment that he was going to
need to be, uh, you know, a large scale meat packer.
For example, he did not have refrigerated railed cars at
(05:11):
his disposal. Those have been around since eighteen seventy eight,
but George did not have any until after the turn
of the century. So George Harmel needed to set himself
apart in some way. Since he couldn't just go head
to head with all these giant, established meat packing companies,
he decided to focus on two things. The first was pork,
since more of the pig carcass was used than in
(05:35):
many other food animals, and quality. So when other businesses
were cutting their pork products with filt with fillers, he
really stuck as much as he could just to meet
that came from pigs, and the company incorporated in nineteen
o one, and by four they were slaughtering a million
hogs each year. George Hormel's son Jay, he had other
(05:58):
sons as well, but Jay the one who plays a
part in this part of the story. He was a
veteran of World War One, having served as chief quartermaster
and the American Expeditionary Forces. Jay came back from the
war with a sense of what canned goods could do
in terms of feeding an army, so he encouraged Hormel
to look into focusing on canned meat products. The company's
(06:22):
first canned ham came out in nine six. In nine
George Hormel retired and Jay took the helm after his
father was no longer part of the business, and at
this point Hormel introduced Didnty Moore beef stew and Hormel
Chili uh. Those both came out in at about the
same time, the Hormel Company recognized that it had a
(06:44):
surplus of shoulder meat from pigs. Now, this wasn't a
particularly popular cut of meat because neatly removing the meat
from the bone was a really time and labor intensive process,
and because a lot of consumers thought that it was
in fury year to other cuts of pork like ham.
And what the Hormel Company decided to do was to
(07:05):
grind up this shoulder meat along with some ham and
add salt, water, a bit of sugar, and some sodium nitrate.
That last ingredient preserves the color of the meat and
it also inhibits bacterial growth. Uh. And today's spam also
includes potato starch, but that was not in the original.
It was added later to keep the liquid from seeping
out of the meat and forming a gelatinous layer on top,
(07:28):
which I remember seeing periodically agains when I was a kid,
and it was indeed kind of gross. Yeah, that was
in the eighties when they made that change. Um. This
new product's name was coined by Kenneth Dagonau, who was
not only a Broadway actor but also the brother of
a Hormel VP. He won a hundred dollars for his efforts.
(07:52):
It's allegedly a portmanteau of spiced and ham, but the
specifics on that are really not documented, and Hormel claim
that what it really stands for is a closely guarded
secret that makes it sound like it's uh somehow secretly
spelling out horrible things that could be contained in it.
But the important thing is that spam took the world
(08:14):
by storm, and we're going to talk about that after
we have a quick ad break, and now I'll get
to spam and how it came to dominate the market. Yeah.
So spam made its entry into the market in nine seven,
(08:34):
and its launch was accompanied by a huge advertising campaign,
and it builds spam is suitable for every meal and
for snacks. Spam was basically an instant hit, and it
took eighteen percent of the market share for canned ham
in its first year. That is hugely significant. The US
was starting to recover somewhat from the Great Depression, but
(08:55):
overall people were really excited about having access to an
inexpensive shelf stable store some meat. Plus it's really long
shelf life meant that you could stock up when you
had extra money and you would have like a nice
little go to in your pantry of edibles. Spam also
got an endorsement from George Burns and Gracie Allen on
their radio show There's a Charming Depending on Your Taste
(09:19):
print ad for both Spam and the show, in which
George says to Gracie, Gracie, if a strange man offered
to buy you lunch, what would you say? And then
Gracie replies, spam, I think it's charming, but it is
pretty charming. Basically, everything that two did was charming to me. Um.
Also on the print ad was the copy Colder Hot
(09:42):
Spam Hits the spot cold Bits Spam and vegetable mold
Spam and Salad sandwiches, hot Spam and eggs, Spam and waffles,
Baked spam spam Burgers. A singing radio commercial also came
out in the forties that began and ended with the
words spam, spam, space, um, spam and to look at it,
(10:02):
as I did look at it many times as I
was doing research. It looks a lot like the Monty
Python sketch, but in reality it was sung to the
tune of My Body Lies over the Ocean. Now. I
just wish someone could convince Terry Jones to sing the
spam song in his family d Voice to my Body
Lies over the Ocean. I bet we could would be
(10:23):
real start a campaign. World War two really launched spam
into the American patriotic consciousness. US residents were encouraged to
give up beef and premium cuts of other meats so
that they could help the war effort, and spam was
a handy alternative. Yeah, so while people were eating spam
out of necessity towards the end of the Great Depression
(10:43):
because it was cheap and they didn't have a lot
of money. This time, it was more of a sacrifice
to support the United States UM. The Hormail Company, along
with other meat producers, made specially packaged army versions of spam.
These were basically extremely large spam loaves and olive drab tins.
Then they weren't branded as spam with that distinctive blue
(11:05):
spam label. They contained some extra salt so that they
could withstand the temperature extremes of all the places that
the troops were deployed. Uh there were also some ordinary
cans of spam that were basically bought in a pinch
to try to make ends meet for the men's rations.
Hormel wound up providing at least one hundred million pounds
(11:26):
of spam during World War Two. That's a lot of spam.
It's so much spam. It's a running theme in World
War two soldiers discussions of the war and for the troops,
the word spam actually came to mean any kind of
processed and preserved meat, and it was on the menu
a lot. It's often seemed like it was three three
(11:46):
meals a day, every single day. So spam three meals
a day didn't literally need mean brand name spam, but
processed meat three meals a day. Yeah, People basically thought
of all of that stuff as spam. It's similar to
how all tissues are Kleenex. And that is the thing
that Hormil tries so hard to come back. In nineteen
(12:09):
sixty six, when the Hormail Company was celebrating its seventy
five birthday, Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in a letter to
a retired Hormail president saying, quote, I ate my share
of spam, along with millions of other soldiers. I'll even
confess to a few unkind remarks about it uttered during
the strain of battle, you understand, But as former commander
(12:31):
in chief, I believe I can still forgive you for
your only sin sending us so much of it. That's
so much of it meant that a lot of servicemen
swore they would never touch another can of spam once
the war was over. And while this may have been
true at least temporarily, many people who had sworn never
to touch another piece of spam wound up feeling a
(12:51):
little nostalgic for it. Once the war was over, eating
spam took on this patriotic air, and it was bolstered
this concept of patriotism linked to spam by Hormel's advertising campaign,
which tied spam to wholesome values and patriotic spirit, and
that advertising plan went on throughout the fifties. It was
(13:12):
also bolstered by a sixty member dance troup known as
the Hormel Girls, who toured around in USO fashion after
the end of the war, after getting their start in
ninety seven. I hope we have pictures of those I
saw a couple. I did not find any that we
can like put in our blog or anything, but there
are some that could be a great Halloween costume. The
(13:35):
combination of nostalgia patriotism meant that spam's heyday in the
US really ran through the fifties and the sixties. Cookbooks
featured spam is an ingredient in all kinds of dishes,
but as the seventies crept in, spam's popularity started to
fade a bit. On December, the last skit on that
(13:58):
night's episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus was the infamous
spam sketch in which a couple goes to a cafe
where they're serving a lot of spam, and then there
are vikings who also sing about spam. Then, on December
thirty one, nineteen seventy four, episode of Mash, Hawkeye and
Trapp Or John save Radar's pet Lamb for being slaughtered
(14:20):
for a feast by sculpting a new one out of spam.
Weird Al Yankovic's Spam song sung to the tune of
Our E m Stand came out in nine at which
point the can meat had really become cemented in the
American consciousness as both a joke and junk food. People
started to think of spam as mystery meat made of remnants,
the way that hot dogs are reported to be, even
(14:41):
though its ingredients had not changed aside from that addition
of potatoes starts that we talked about earlier, and today
people really kind of think of spam as dated and cheap.
At least most people, yeah, in the United States. This
is not the case in several other parts of the world.
So to talk about spam in other parts of the world,
(15:02):
we need to zip back to World War Two for
a minute. In the United States. The Lend Lease Act
was passed on March eleventh, ninety one, and as its
name suggests, the Lend Lease Act allowed the United States
to lend or lease supplies and materials to Allied nations
without payment if doing so was quote vital to the
(15:23):
defense of the United States. So this was a way
for the United States to help the war effort without
actually committing troops, which would happen eventually after the Japanese
bombing of Pearl Harbor on December seven of the same year.
Through the Lend Lease Act, spam made its way to Russia.
In Nikita Kushchev's memoir, speaking of World War Two, he says, quote,
(15:45):
there were many jokes going around in the army, some
of them off color about American spam, but it tasted good. Nonetheless,
without spam, we wouldn't have been able to feed our army.
Spam also made its way to several other parts of
the world through the Lend Lease Act and through the
presence of American troops during the war, along with other
military actions. So we're going to talk specifically about Hawaii,
(16:08):
which at this point was not yet a state, as
well as the Philippines and South Korea and in Hawaii.
Spam's influence came from two sources. One was the American
g i s who were stationed there or who passed
through Hawaii on their way to other parts of the Pacific.
The other was Hawaii's Japanese population. So during World War
(16:30):
Two in the continental United States, the government forced many
Japanese Americans into internment camps. This is absolutely a thing
that is on the list for podcast episode later on UM. Consequently,
spam sometimes because it makes an appearance in Japanese American food,
because it was one of the foods that was being
served in the camps. But Hawaii was not yet a state,
(16:54):
so the United States government could not really begin in
turning its citizens. I mean, you can make an our
gument that the United States government shouldn't have been interning
its citizens without due process in the first place. It's
super did not have that authority to do in Hawaii. Also,
the Japanese population of Hawaii was just too big to
(17:15):
be interned. There were way too many people of Japanese ancestry.
The camps that would have been required were too large
for the islands themselves to be able to support. There
was just no way that the United States could do
in Hawaii what it was doing in the continental United States. Instead,
to combat this perceived threat from people with Japanese ancestry,
(17:38):
restrictions were placed on the movements and activities of people
that were of Japanese descent in Hawaii. So Japanese Hawaiians
were banned from deep sea fishing, which had been one
of the ways that they primarily sourced their food for
the Japanese community. Because of Hawaii's remote location, it's landscape
and the available food sources, is the easiest protein source
(18:01):
for Japanese Hawaiians to use to replace what they've lost
from deep sea fishing was spam. Consequently, spam has been
incorporated into many Japanese dishes, and these very based on
different ethnic groups who live in Japan, but in particular,
there is a lot of sort of Hawaiian Japanese spam fusion.
There's a Yummy restaurant here in Atlanta that does a
(18:24):
yummy um spam entree with gravy and deliciousness, and I
absolutely love it. The most famous example of the spam
dishes that they were making at this time, though, is
spam musubi, which is spam over rice. It's wrapped in
nori seaweed, and it's sometimes erroneously called spam sushi. It
(18:44):
does kind of resemble a sushi role, but musubi is
it's more accurate name. Today. Hawaii is of course a
state and consumes more spam than any other state, and
the island of Waikiki hosts an annual spam jam Let's
Go oh Um. Thanks to the presence of g I
s during World War Two and an ongoing military presence thereafter,
(19:07):
spam also became very popular in Guam and Okinawa and Korea,
and Japan citizens were really just desperately suffering during World
War Two. As a side note, if you have not
(19:28):
seen the Japanese film Grave of the Fireflies, this will
give you an idea of how desperately hard things were
for Japanese citizens during the war. Canned meats like spam
really saved people's lives and consequently became incorporated into local
cuisines there as well. In South Korea, this continued during
(19:48):
the Korean War. American soldiers station they're not considering spam
to be particularly valuable or important. We're happy to use
it as trade and to increase goodwill, and they would
also sell it on the black market later on, and
during the Korean War, the United States Army's Postal Exchange
or p X was often the only place that people
(20:09):
could get meat. Spam was really what was available, and
since people couldn't afford to buy it necessarily from the
p X, it really came to be considered a luxury um.
It's an ingredient in a dish called boudei gay which
I hope I am pronouncing correctly, which is also called
military stew, and that's basically a thick stew that also
(20:30):
includes Korean ingredients like kimchi. A fried slab of pork
called pu yuck was also part of Korean cuisine before
the introduction of spam, and spam became a replacement for
pork in that dish when people couldn't get ahold of
regular pork. So spam is undoubtedly an economy class food
in the United States, but it's a little more expensive
(20:52):
in Korea, and this association with scarcity and expense from
earlier times means that today it's frequently given as a
really high class gift. Often this is part of a
really elaborate gift box that includes other foods Korea is
consequently the world's second largest consumer of spam after the
United States, and spam similarly became popular in the Philippines
(21:16):
as an after effect of U S military presence. Today,
in the Philippines, it's often purchased outside of the country
by people who are traveling for pleasure or business, and
then brought home with them as traditional homecoming gifts. This
means a lot of times if you're in duty free
shops at airports that cater to a lot of Filipino travelers,
(21:36):
there will be spam in the duty free shop. And
spam is treated in the Philippines on both the black
and the gray markets, and there are actually nine different
legitimately available varieties of spam there. There's even a Turkey
version for the nation's Muslim population. I wonder what that
tastes like. I also wonder what that tastes like. UM.
The reason that there is a black market at a
(21:57):
gray market for spam is that there are some restrictions
on imports in Philippines, which means there's more demand for
spam than is actually allowed to be imported. UM. And
when when you look at the numbers of the number
of cans sold versus the number of people allowed to
sell it. It just doesn't add up. There is additional
(22:19):
spam coming from somewhere. So there's a legitimate argument to
be made here that all of these examples are examples
of undo American influence on other cultures. But in the
case of spam in particular, local cuisines have really taken
spam and then absorbed it and made it into something
(22:39):
that is uniquely their own, whereas in the United States
people were usually basically using spam as a substitute for
other meat rather than making something new and uniquely spam
out of it. And today's spam is distributed in more
than fifty countries and it's trademarked in more than a hundred.
There are actually two spam cans in the permanent collection
(23:00):
at the Smithsonian and in the Division of the History
of Technology. One was the original ninety seven can, which
had to be opened using a key, and the other
is a more modern luncheon meat can which was introduced
in nine seven, which I think has the poll tab style.
Uh and the look of the label for spam has
stayed basically the same all this time. Spam was also
(23:24):
served at a breakfast at the opening of a World
War Two exhibition at the National Museum of American History,
and the circle back a little bit to Spam's manufacturer.
Hormel is still a majority owned by family, but it's
no longer really family run. Family still owns it, but
other professionals of running things are in charge of the company.
I also in this episode had a whole rather lengthy
(23:47):
section about labor history at the Hormail Company, which has
some actually very interesting twists and turns and contradictions. There
were parts of the company's history that were really revolutionary
in terms of labor relations, and then there are other
parts of the company's history at which there were really
contentious and heated strikes. And then in one case, uh,
(24:08):
a strange autoimmune disease that cropped up at one of
its meat suppliers. But it's just the whole long series
of things. Um. And then as I you know, went
through this outline too edit it, it all seemed extremely
ancillary to the story of spam. So I don't think
(24:29):
we will have a whole episode on the history of
labor relations at the Hormail Company. But if you are
interested in such a thing, I will put the links
to my sources on that in our show notes, so
you can check them out for yourself. Uh I, Um,
most of my research for this sort of fell on
either side of a weekend, and on the Friday part,
(24:51):
I kept being like, maybe I should go get some
spam and eat it, because I don't. I'm not sure
I've ever eaten spam. I'm sure I did at some
point as a child. We have it in our three Yeah,
I know, I know I've had. Should be fun toast
that I know for sure, that's all no, but it is.
It is another kind of military joke food. We definitely
(25:13):
have spam in our three day emergency kit, you know,
in case there's some kind of disaster. Uh So that
was sort of Friday, and then on Monday, I had
these resources that had all of these spam recipes and
I kept being like, that sounds disgusting, Like the ones
that were um, you know that the military stew and
(25:33):
the spam we Stuie Like that sounded really interesting to me.
But then there are ones that were American feeds that
were made with spam, and I was like, that's the
grossest thing that I've ever heard of. I'm not throwing
a shade to spam. But man, people have put together
to some gross sounding recipes, lots of non spam grossery recipes. Okay,
one of them was fake scargo and I'm just gonna
(25:54):
believe it. It's like Spam's Halloween costume about don't even
know what that is. I like escargo, and the idea
of using spam to make uh fake escargo really grossed
me out. Thank you so much for joining us today
(26:16):
for this classic. If you have heard any kind of
email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during
the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It
might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email
address again. You can now reach us at History podcast
at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
(26:39):
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuffy miss In History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen,
and that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, do you remember
(00:46):
recently on our Facebook page and we had that weird
influx of self published book spam? Yeah, Like suddenly just
tons of posts were showing up of people promoting their
self published books that off I had nothing to do
with history. No, none of them. And that was the
only thing and they had in common was that none
of them were about history. Otherwise they were by different people,
(01:08):
they were posted from different accounts, they were in different genres.
It was very strange, and because I was wondering, maybe,
you know, maybe there had been some article that had
gotten passed around that was like to promote your e
book post on random people's Facebook pages. I posted on
our Facebook page to say sort of, hey listeners, any
of you have any idea why this might be happening. Um.
(01:31):
A couple of people really went out of their way
to yell at us and call us idiots for even
asking that question. Most people kind of shrugged their shoulders
virtually about it. A few people gave us suggestions, were
trying to like track down exactly what was going on,
but a couple of people said, you know it would
be cool is if you did an episode about spam
(01:52):
the food. Not spam like the unwanted e communication, but
spam the food. And I can get behind that because
I will loudly and proudly say I quite enjoy spam. Yeah.
Well uh, And immediately from just the few facts that
I already knew about spam's influence on various cuisines in
(02:14):
the wake of World War Two, I was like, Yeah,
let's do that. That sounds actually pretty interesting and awesome.
And then that led to several other people chiming in
with interesting tidbits about spam and history. So that is
what we were talking about today. Thank you random people
who put their weird e books on our Facebook page.
It was a secuitous journey, but we got to a
(02:34):
cool episode idea and I like sharing the journeys. Sometimes
a lot of times people ask us how we come
up with these things. Well that's an example. So yes,
today we were going to talk about spam's history and
how spam played a part in some pretty important historical events,
namely World War two and the Korean War. YA. So
(02:57):
in case anyone does not know, spam is made by
Hormel Foods. George A. Hormel was born in eighteen sixty
in Buffalo, New York. Now, their last name was originally
pronounced Hormal to rhyme with normal, and it's not totally
clear when Hormel became hormel Um because we've both been
saying Hormel all our lives, and for the sake of consistency,
(03:20):
we're just gonna go with Hormel. That was definitely what
the company was calling itself by the time spam was invented.
So the Hormel family moved to Toledo, Ohio when George
was just six, and he worked in his father's tannery
after school. The Panic of eighteen seventy three meant that
the family found itself needing additional income, so at the
(03:42):
age of twelve, George left school so that he could
spend more time working and make more money for the family.
After a few brief stints and a couple of other jobs,
he wound up working at his uncle's meat packing business,
and he worked there until he was nineteen, and George
continued to work in different jobs throughout his young adulthood.
He was working as a traveling salesman when he found
(04:04):
a meat shop for sale in Austin, Minnesota, where he
was passing through while he was doing some business in
his sales and he bought this meat shop and he
opened it, putting his experience at his uncle's meat packing
operation into practice and opening his own meat business. Soon
he really wanted the business to be more than just
a butcher's shop, so he borrowed some money, found an investor,
(04:27):
and established George A. Hormel and Company. The George was
just G. E O with period after it, and they
operated out of an abandoned creamery that was in and
at that point he was thirty one years old. All
of the United States biggest meat packing operations were in Chicago,
and here he was in Austin, Minnesota, hundreds of miles
(04:49):
away from that sort of nexus of industry, and he
was also brand new. He was a small business in
an industry that at that point was completely dominated by
really established, long time powerhouses. And he also didn't actually
have some of the equipment that he was going to
need to be, uh, you know, a large scale meat packer.
For example, he did not have refrigerated railed cars at
(05:11):
his disposal. Those have been around since eighteen seventy eight,
but George did not have any until after the turn
of the century. So George Harmel needed to set himself
apart in some way. Since he couldn't just go head
to head with all these giant, established meat packing companies,
he decided to focus on two things. The first was pork,
since more of the pig carcass was used than in
(05:35):
many other food animals, and quality. So when other businesses
were cutting their pork products with filt with fillers, he
really stuck as much as he could just to meet
that came from pigs, and the company incorporated in nineteen
o one, and by four they were slaughtering a million
hogs each year. George Hormel's son Jay, he had other
(05:58):
sons as well, but Jay the one who plays a
part in this part of the story. He was a
veteran of World War One, having served as chief quartermaster
and the American Expeditionary Forces. Jay came back from the
war with a sense of what canned goods could do
in terms of feeding an army, so he encouraged Hormel
to look into focusing on canned meat products. The company's
(06:22):
first canned ham came out in nine six. In nine
George Hormel retired and Jay took the helm after his
father was no longer part of the business, and at
this point Hormel introduced Didnty Moore beef stew and Hormel
Chili uh. Those both came out in at about the
same time, the Hormel Company recognized that it had a
(06:44):
surplus of shoulder meat from pigs. Now, this wasn't a
particularly popular cut of meat because neatly removing the meat
from the bone was a really time and labor intensive process,
and because a lot of consumers thought that it was
in fury year to other cuts of pork like ham.
And what the Hormel Company decided to do was to
(07:05):
grind up this shoulder meat along with some ham and
add salt, water, a bit of sugar, and some sodium nitrate.
That last ingredient preserves the color of the meat and
it also inhibits bacterial growth. Uh. And today's spam also
includes potato starch, but that was not in the original.
It was added later to keep the liquid from seeping
out of the meat and forming a gelatinous layer on top,
(07:28):
which I remember seeing periodically agains when I was a kid,
and it was indeed kind of gross. Yeah, that was
in the eighties when they made that change. Um. This
new product's name was coined by Kenneth Dagonau, who was
not only a Broadway actor but also the brother of
a Hormel VP. He won a hundred dollars for his efforts.
(07:52):
It's allegedly a portmanteau of spiced and ham, but the
specifics on that are really not documented, and Hormel claim
that what it really stands for is a closely guarded
secret that makes it sound like it's uh somehow secretly
spelling out horrible things that could be contained in it.
But the important thing is that spam took the world
(08:14):
by storm, and we're going to talk about that after
we have a quick ad break, and now I'll get
to spam and how it came to dominate the market. Yeah.
So spam made its entry into the market in nine seven,
(08:34):
and its launch was accompanied by a huge advertising campaign,
and it builds spam is suitable for every meal and
for snacks. Spam was basically an instant hit, and it
took eighteen percent of the market share for canned ham
in its first year. That is hugely significant. The US
was starting to recover somewhat from the Great Depression, but
(08:55):
overall people were really excited about having access to an
inexpensive shelf stable store some meat. Plus it's really long
shelf life meant that you could stock up when you
had extra money and you would have like a nice
little go to in your pantry of edibles. Spam also
got an endorsement from George Burns and Gracie Allen on
their radio show There's a Charming Depending on Your Taste
(09:19):
print ad for both Spam and the show, in which
George says to Gracie, Gracie, if a strange man offered
to buy you lunch, what would you say? And then
Gracie replies, spam, I think it's charming, but it is
pretty charming. Basically, everything that two did was charming to me. Um.
Also on the print ad was the copy Colder Hot
(09:42):
Spam Hits the spot cold Bits Spam and vegetable mold
Spam and Salad sandwiches, hot Spam and eggs, Spam and waffles,
Baked spam spam Burgers. A singing radio commercial also came
out in the forties that began and ended with the
words spam, spam, space, um, spam and to look at it,
(10:02):
as I did look at it many times as I
was doing research. It looks a lot like the Monty
Python sketch, but in reality it was sung to the
tune of My Body Lies over the Ocean. Now. I
just wish someone could convince Terry Jones to sing the
spam song in his family d Voice to my Body
Lies over the Ocean. I bet we could would be
(10:23):
real start a campaign. World War two really launched spam
into the American patriotic consciousness. US residents were encouraged to
give up beef and premium cuts of other meats so
that they could help the war effort, and spam was
a handy alternative. Yeah, so while people were eating spam
out of necessity towards the end of the Great Depression
(10:43):
because it was cheap and they didn't have a lot
of money. This time, it was more of a sacrifice
to support the United States UM. The Hormail Company, along
with other meat producers, made specially packaged army versions of spam.
These were basically extremely large spam loaves and olive drab tins.
Then they weren't branded as spam with that distinctive blue
(11:05):
spam label. They contained some extra salt so that they
could withstand the temperature extremes of all the places that
the troops were deployed. Uh there were also some ordinary
cans of spam that were basically bought in a pinch
to try to make ends meet for the men's rations.
Hormel wound up providing at least one hundred million pounds
(11:26):
of spam during World War Two. That's a lot of spam.
It's so much spam. It's a running theme in World
War two soldiers discussions of the war and for the troops,
the word spam actually came to mean any kind of
processed and preserved meat, and it was on the menu
a lot. It's often seemed like it was three three
(11:46):
meals a day, every single day. So spam three meals
a day didn't literally need mean brand name spam, but
processed meat three meals a day. Yeah, People basically thought
of all of that stuff as spam. It's similar to
how all tissues are Kleenex. And that is the thing
that Hormil tries so hard to come back. In nineteen
(12:09):
sixty six, when the Hormail Company was celebrating its seventy
five birthday, Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in a letter to
a retired Hormail president saying, quote, I ate my share
of spam, along with millions of other soldiers. I'll even
confess to a few unkind remarks about it uttered during
the strain of battle, you understand, But as former commander
(12:31):
in chief, I believe I can still forgive you for
your only sin sending us so much of it. That's
so much of it meant that a lot of servicemen
swore they would never touch another can of spam once
the war was over. And while this may have been
true at least temporarily, many people who had sworn never
to touch another piece of spam wound up feeling a
(12:51):
little nostalgic for it. Once the war was over, eating
spam took on this patriotic air, and it was bolstered
this concept of patriotism linked to spam by Hormel's advertising campaign,
which tied spam to wholesome values and patriotic spirit, and
that advertising plan went on throughout the fifties. It was
(13:12):
also bolstered by a sixty member dance troup known as
the Hormel Girls, who toured around in USO fashion after
the end of the war, after getting their start in
ninety seven. I hope we have pictures of those I
saw a couple. I did not find any that we
can like put in our blog or anything, but there
are some that could be a great Halloween costume. The
(13:35):
combination of nostalgia patriotism meant that spam's heyday in the
US really ran through the fifties and the sixties. Cookbooks
featured spam is an ingredient in all kinds of dishes,
but as the seventies crept in, spam's popularity started to
fade a bit. On December, the last skit on that
(13:58):
night's episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus was the infamous
spam sketch in which a couple goes to a cafe
where they're serving a lot of spam, and then there
are vikings who also sing about spam. Then, on December
thirty one, nineteen seventy four, episode of Mash, Hawkeye and
Trapp Or John save Radar's pet Lamb for being slaughtered
(14:20):
for a feast by sculpting a new one out of spam.
Weird Al Yankovic's Spam song sung to the tune of
Our E m Stand came out in nine at which
point the can meat had really become cemented in the
American consciousness as both a joke and junk food. People
started to think of spam as mystery meat made of remnants,
the way that hot dogs are reported to be, even
(14:41):
though its ingredients had not changed aside from that addition
of potatoes starts that we talked about earlier, and today
people really kind of think of spam as dated and cheap.
At least most people, yeah, in the United States. This
is not the case in several other parts of the world.
So to talk about spam in other parts of the world,
(15:02):
we need to zip back to World War Two for
a minute. In the United States. The Lend Lease Act
was passed on March eleventh, ninety one, and as its
name suggests, the Lend Lease Act allowed the United States
to lend or lease supplies and materials to Allied nations
without payment if doing so was quote vital to the
(15:23):
defense of the United States. So this was a way
for the United States to help the war effort without
actually committing troops, which would happen eventually after the Japanese
bombing of Pearl Harbor on December seven of the same year.
Through the Lend Lease Act, spam made its way to Russia.
In Nikita Kushchev's memoir, speaking of World War Two, he says, quote,
(15:45):
there were many jokes going around in the army, some
of them off color about American spam, but it tasted good. Nonetheless,
without spam, we wouldn't have been able to feed our army.
Spam also made its way to several other parts of
the world through the Lend Lease Act and through the
presence of American troops during the war, along with other
military actions. So we're going to talk specifically about Hawaii,
(16:08):
which at this point was not yet a state, as
well as the Philippines and South Korea and in Hawaii.
Spam's influence came from two sources. One was the American
g i s who were stationed there or who passed
through Hawaii on their way to other parts of the Pacific.
The other was Hawaii's Japanese population. So during World War
(16:30):
Two in the continental United States, the government forced many
Japanese Americans into internment camps. This is absolutely a thing
that is on the list for podcast episode later on UM. Consequently,
spam sometimes because it makes an appearance in Japanese American food,
because it was one of the foods that was being
served in the camps. But Hawaii was not yet a state,
(16:54):
so the United States government could not really begin in
turning its citizens. I mean, you can make an our
gument that the United States government shouldn't have been interning
its citizens without due process in the first place. It's
super did not have that authority to do in Hawaii. Also,
the Japanese population of Hawaii was just too big to
(17:15):
be interned. There were way too many people of Japanese ancestry.
The camps that would have been required were too large
for the islands themselves to be able to support. There
was just no way that the United States could do
in Hawaii what it was doing in the continental United States. Instead,
to combat this perceived threat from people with Japanese ancestry,
(17:38):
restrictions were placed on the movements and activities of people
that were of Japanese descent in Hawaii. So Japanese Hawaiians
were banned from deep sea fishing, which had been one
of the ways that they primarily sourced their food for
the Japanese community. Because of Hawaii's remote location, it's landscape
and the available food sources, is the easiest protein source
(18:01):
for Japanese Hawaiians to use to replace what they've lost
from deep sea fishing was spam. Consequently, spam has been
incorporated into many Japanese dishes, and these very based on
different ethnic groups who live in Japan, but in particular,
there is a lot of sort of Hawaiian Japanese spam fusion.
There's a Yummy restaurant here in Atlanta that does a
(18:24):
yummy um spam entree with gravy and deliciousness, and I
absolutely love it. The most famous example of the spam
dishes that they were making at this time, though, is
spam musubi, which is spam over rice. It's wrapped in
nori seaweed, and it's sometimes erroneously called spam sushi. It
(18:44):
does kind of resemble a sushi role, but musubi is
it's more accurate name. Today. Hawaii is of course a
state and consumes more spam than any other state, and
the island of Waikiki hosts an annual spam jam Let's
Go oh Um. Thanks to the presence of g I
s during World War Two and an ongoing military presence thereafter,
(19:07):
spam also became very popular in Guam and Okinawa and Korea,
and Japan citizens were really just desperately suffering during World
War Two. As a side note, if you have not
(19:28):
seen the Japanese film Grave of the Fireflies, this will
give you an idea of how desperately hard things were
for Japanese citizens during the war. Canned meats like spam
really saved people's lives and consequently became incorporated into local
cuisines there as well. In South Korea, this continued during
(19:48):
the Korean War. American soldiers station they're not considering spam
to be particularly valuable or important. We're happy to use
it as trade and to increase goodwill, and they would
also sell it on the black market later on, and
during the Korean War, the United States Army's Postal Exchange
or p X was often the only place that people
(20:09):
could get meat. Spam was really what was available, and
since people couldn't afford to buy it necessarily from the
p X, it really came to be considered a luxury um.
It's an ingredient in a dish called boudei gay which
I hope I am pronouncing correctly, which is also called
military stew, and that's basically a thick stew that also
(20:30):
includes Korean ingredients like kimchi. A fried slab of pork
called pu yuck was also part of Korean cuisine before
the introduction of spam, and spam became a replacement for
pork in that dish when people couldn't get ahold of
regular pork. So spam is undoubtedly an economy class food
in the United States, but it's a little more expensive
(20:52):
in Korea, and this association with scarcity and expense from
earlier times means that today it's frequently given as a
really high class gift. Often this is part of a
really elaborate gift box that includes other foods Korea is
consequently the world's second largest consumer of spam after the
United States, and spam similarly became popular in the Philippines
(21:16):
as an after effect of U S military presence. Today,
in the Philippines, it's often purchased outside of the country
by people who are traveling for pleasure or business, and
then brought home with them as traditional homecoming gifts. This
means a lot of times if you're in duty free
shops at airports that cater to a lot of Filipino travelers,
(21:36):
there will be spam in the duty free shop. And
spam is treated in the Philippines on both the black
and the gray markets, and there are actually nine different
legitimately available varieties of spam there. There's even a Turkey
version for the nation's Muslim population. I wonder what that
tastes like. I also wonder what that tastes like. UM.
The reason that there is a black market at a
(21:57):
gray market for spam is that there are some restrictions
on imports in Philippines, which means there's more demand for
spam than is actually allowed to be imported. UM. And
when when you look at the numbers of the number
of cans sold versus the number of people allowed to
sell it. It just doesn't add up. There is additional
(22:19):
spam coming from somewhere. So there's a legitimate argument to
be made here that all of these examples are examples
of undo American influence on other cultures. But in the
case of spam in particular, local cuisines have really taken
spam and then absorbed it and made it into something
(22:39):
that is uniquely their own, whereas in the United States
people were usually basically using spam as a substitute for
other meat rather than making something new and uniquely spam
out of it. And today's spam is distributed in more
than fifty countries and it's trademarked in more than a hundred.
There are actually two spam cans in the permanent collection
(23:00):
at the Smithsonian and in the Division of the History
of Technology. One was the original ninety seven can, which
had to be opened using a key, and the other
is a more modern luncheon meat can which was introduced
in nine seven, which I think has the poll tab style.
Uh and the look of the label for spam has
stayed basically the same all this time. Spam was also
(23:24):
served at a breakfast at the opening of a World
War Two exhibition at the National Museum of American History,
and the circle back a little bit to Spam's manufacturer.
Hormel is still a majority owned by family, but it's
no longer really family run. Family still owns it, but
other professionals of running things are in charge of the company.
I also in this episode had a whole rather lengthy
(23:47):
section about labor history at the Hormail Company, which has
some actually very interesting twists and turns and contradictions. There
were parts of the company's history that were really revolutionary
in terms of labor relations, and then there are other
parts of the company's history at which there were really
contentious and heated strikes. And then in one case, uh,
(24:08):
a strange autoimmune disease that cropped up at one of
its meat suppliers. But it's just the whole long series
of things. Um. And then as I you know, went
through this outline too edit it, it all seemed extremely
ancillary to the story of spam. So I don't think
(24:29):
we will have a whole episode on the history of
labor relations at the Hormail Company. But if you are
interested in such a thing, I will put the links
to my sources on that in our show notes, so
you can check them out for yourself. Uh I, Um,
most of my research for this sort of fell on
either side of a weekend, and on the Friday part,
(24:51):
I kept being like, maybe I should go get some
spam and eat it, because I don't. I'm not sure
I've ever eaten spam. I'm sure I did at some
point as a child. We have it in our three Yeah,
I know, I know I've had. Should be fun toast
that I know for sure, that's all no, but it is.
It is another kind of military joke food. We definitely
(25:13):
have spam in our three day emergency kit, you know,
in case there's some kind of disaster. Uh So that
was sort of Friday, and then on Monday, I had
these resources that had all of these spam recipes and
I kept being like, that sounds disgusting, Like the ones
that were um, you know that the military stew and
(25:33):
the spam we Stuie Like that sounded really interesting to me.
But then there are ones that were American feeds that
were made with spam, and I was like, that's the
grossest thing that I've ever heard of. I'm not throwing
a shade to spam. But man, people have put together
to some gross sounding recipes, lots of non spam grossery recipes. Okay,
one of them was fake scargo and I'm just gonna
(25:54):
believe it. It's like Spam's Halloween costume about don't even
know what that is. I like escargo, and the idea
of using spam to make uh fake escargo really grossed
me out. Thank you so much for joining us today
(26:16):
for this classic. If you have heard any kind of
email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during
the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It
might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email
address again. You can now reach us at History podcast
at i heart radio dot com, and we're all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
(26:39):
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuffy miss In History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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