October 28, 2017 • 40 mins
In this week's SYSK Select episode, SPAM is a canned meat product made from pork shoulder and ham. First introduced in 1937, this iconic food has spread to stores across the world. But what exactly is it, how did it get here -- and why is its shelf life "indefinite?" Tune in to find out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's
s Y s K Selects, I've chosen spam. There's so
much to understand about spam, including one of my favorite
facts of our entire show that spam never goes bad.
So enjoy spam. Now, welcome to Stuff you Should Know
(00:27):
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast on Josh Clark. I am Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and that's a stuff you
should know. Let's all go home. Some people are probably
(00:48):
already home. Well, go to bed, Okay. He told me
that in the email the other day. Go back to sleep.
I don't get that. You're just being goofye okay, just
lightning the moon like um, yeah, hey buddy, Hey Josh,
I have a story for you. All right, let's hear it.
So last November, not too many months ago, stop looking,
(01:12):
just listen, all right, Uh, there was a carnival cruise
liner that had a little fire. The Carnival Splendor was
on a seven day trip to the Mexican Riviera and
about forty four miles off the coast of Mexico, it
went adrift because of fire in the engine room just
knocked everything out so they lost power, which means it
(01:33):
was basically just like UM being on an abandoned boat,
but filled with people ghost ship a ghost ship and
filled with not just people, filled with two hundred and
fifty magicians who were on a convention. Um. That sounds
like my idea of hell on Earth. Okay. In addition
to the magicians, which apologies to any magicians listening, we
(01:56):
got sculptures melting. You've got magicians they can't find their
rabbits um. You've got UM toilets of their own flush.
You've got UM cabins that are UM stuffy. You have
UM warm food or warm drink. Yes, so Carnival in
their credit did UM give away free beer and wine
(02:17):
and all that. But it was warm. So for three
days all these people were just sitting adrift, right, and
a very just They weren't very happy. The US Navy
flew sorties out to this UM this ship and dropped
off supplies. They dropped off canned lump crab meat, they
(02:39):
dropped off pop tarts, they dropped off a little something
called spam canned meat. And when the ship was finally
I think towed back to uh Port. The people dubbed
this crazy vacation. What do you think do you think
they they dubbed it the hop tart Cation? Now do
(03:01):
you think they dubbed it the lump crab meat Cation. No,
of course they dubbed it spam cation two thousand ten. Yeah,
that's like Chad's story. Our buddy Chad was on a
cruise remember when he was younger, that the power went down.
He never told me this one. Oh yeah, he said
it was like Sodom and Gamora for a couple of days. Really,
Oh yeah, yeah. He said that people were having a
(03:23):
lot of fun and engaging inside of me, just in
Gamore and me having a good time, is what he
how he characterized it. That's crazy. I wonder if he
just didn't realize that it would have been like that
either way, with the power on or off. He was
just exposed to the power off part. I don't know.
He kind of made it seem like that with the
power down, people just it was a little nutty. It
was sort of like the end times are here. We're
(03:45):
on a cruise ship adrift, and let's just have have
fun with each other. Crazy. Yeah, I've never been on
a cruise, you know. Yeah, I'm not a cruise guy.
My dad he's turned into a cruise guy. He and uh,
he and my step mom and the cruises. But they
know my dad's way into him. Every time they go,
they come back with like a stomach bug or the
(04:06):
flu or just apparently they just it's like the epidemic
just goes through like crazy, like wildfire. My friend Andrew
in New York or from l A, but from the Bronx.
Andrew his uh, he showed me the tape of his graham.
I think it was his grandmother. Maybe it was his
aunt this, you know, like the old Jewish lady and
(04:27):
you talking about a cruise and she was explaining about
the cruise and how much it costs and how much
you get, and she was like, it almost costs, he said.
She said it costs more to stay at home, Like
she thought it was cheaper to go on a cruise
than to just live her life at home. Huh, well,
she doesn't live in New York. It was very funny though. Yeah,
I didn't tell her right, but Andrew, if you're listening,
I still remember that. And if you're listening, Chuck, sorry
(04:50):
for that one. I am. So that was spam cation
two thousand ten, and of course they named a spam
cation spam the food. By the way, if you were
hoping to hear about spam, email, sorry, we'll mention that.
We'll mention that briefly. But this is about the iconic
potted meat, right, which, by the way, Chuck. Next July
(05:10):
five will be it's seventy fifth birthday. July twelve, it
was interruced to the public twelve, it will have been
seventy five years since it was trademarked and technically born. Yeah.
And then now in twenty five years there will be
a spam tennial is what they'll probably call it, yes,
which will be fantastic. So, Chuck, um, let's talk about spam.
(05:34):
It's shrouded in mystery. No one has a clue what's
in it, or in what degree, or what it's made of.
So Chuck, what is spam? Josh? Spam is a pinkish
brick of meat that is canned and it is We
actually do know what's in it. It is pretty easy.
It's uh, pork shoulder and ham. Yeah, and ham's from
(05:55):
the butt, right, it's from the rear, hind legs and
rear end of a pig is what ham is. It's
also got a lot of salt because you need that
to help flavor and preserve the meat. And I got
a little bit of sugar for flavor and uh water
and then a tiny amount is what they say on
the Hormel site. They use the word tiny A tiny
(06:18):
amount of sodium nitrite, which keeps the botulism away. It's
keeps a botuli is um away. And it also keeps
the pink a shoe because if not, spam would turn gray,
which is not very appetizing. It's they're doing their best
to keep it pink. So um. I don't know that
the pinker the gray with spam specifically would make a difference.
(06:38):
But the grabster, for some reason who wrote this article
how spam um? He didn't He left out potato starts
for some reason. How was that in there? Yeah, potato
starts in there too. I did not see that spam
has a Hormel on the website says the shelf life
is indefinite. No, yes, wow, they say it's indefinite. They
recommend you eat it. It It is amped within three years
(07:01):
of the stamped. Because the flavor quote gradually declines. It
declines to the bottom of the can. Yeah, but it's
still abedible to shake it up. I'm sure it goes
right back. Yeah, that's really something. So should we do
history first or should we go into the production? Um,
we need to make sense to do history first. Well,
let's do history then. You know, before it was called spam,
(07:23):
there was a product on the market UM called Hormel
spiced ham. Did you know that? I did not know that.
And it wasn't selling very well. Well because Hormel was
in the fresh meat biz, right, And apparently it's just
it was hard to make your name in the fresh
meat biz because it was just kind of all the
same looking right, like, look at this turkey breast. It
(07:44):
looks like the turkey breast next to us. Imagine they
still have the same problem today. But they decided to
get into the can meat business. Well, that was George
Hormel's problem. Jay Hormel was the one who said, well,
let's just let's yeah, get into canned meat. And he
was the son of George the found or. And this
was in the late eighteen hundreds in Austin, Minnesota, Yes,
(08:05):
which is still the home of UM. Hormel. Yeah right,
and where it's one of two places it's produced. No,
there's a few others. Oh, they added, Yeah, there's a
care South Korea, Denmark, and I can't remember where the
third one is. Okay, in North America. You're right, Fremont,
Nebraska is the other place. So, Um, Jay Hormel is
(08:27):
I guess the he comes into his father's business and
just revamped him and probably kept it going today can
meat exactly. Um. One of the reasons why he got
into caned meat was because they were just not able
to make a name for themselves in the fresh meat,
but also because he came into the business um during
(08:48):
the depression, and there was a lot of thrifty nous
so people wanted something that um was cheap and delicious
that they could feed their family but meaty, right, and
jahor Mel gave him spiced ham. But it wasn't called
spam at first, like I said, it was called spiced ham, right. Yeah,
Well he had he had problems at first, um packaging
(09:10):
it because it took a lot of trial and error
because canning meat it was a pretty new fangled thing
at the time, and apparently sell walls the heat would call. So, yeah,
we need to point out that spam is cooked. Yeah,
it comes like you can eat it right out of
the can. It's I have already have you man? Not me?
(09:30):
I mean I haven't eaten spam literally since college. But
we used to take him on camping trips and fried up.
Well yeah, that's not right out of the can. No,
but I could also eat it out of the can circumstance.
I've never eaten it out of the can. Yeah, it's
you know, it's the tastes the same, but man fried
like I was remembering that taste today. I mean, it's
been twenty years, though probably not fifteen. It's been a
(09:51):
lot less than that for me. Really. Oh yeah, you
and his families from Okinawa and Okanowan's are crazy for
spam really. Oh yeah, like Hawaiian. Yeah, we'll get to
that too. Uh so, uh, the cell walls would break
down and release the water from the meat. So what
would you would have was as dry meat floating in water,
which is pretty gross. It's separate because the cells would lies.
(10:16):
That's right, It's just not good. So over time they
figured out the canning process, which meant a lot of
salt in the precise uh temperature that you need to
cook it at to preserve it to where it is moist.
And it also has to be mixed in cannon a vacuum,
which is really important. The key. That's the key. If
you yeah, if you mix it and can it in
(10:37):
a vacuum, you should be okay. And speaking of key,
remember when you needed a key to open it? No,
I wasn't alive, then you are. It wasn't that long ago.
I wasn't paying attention to spam. Yeah, there was a key.
It came attached to the can, and you would take
off the key and insert into a little thing and
roll it back like I guess like old sardine cans
(10:57):
used to do the same thing. Okay, yeah, now I've
seen that in like cartoons from the sixties. But I
didn't know spam had that sam key before they went
I guess with the pole tablet? Was that like a
giveaway though, like a spam key, like you'd send off
for it or would they tell him at the story
came attached to the bottom of the can. Oh, gotcha, man,
those are the good old days. It was self contained
(11:18):
and fairly explainatory. All right, So J Hormel figures out
how to can meat. But he's not. He's he was
a born marketer. The guy sold um. He came up
with Hormel's Chili kuncarnate. He hired a twenty piece Mexican
band to go around the country like touting it's goodness,
and that was Los Lobos, right um and Gypsy Kings,
I think, and uh so like he would come up
(11:40):
with great publicity since he was good at marketing, but
he was he was hamstrung by U by the name
Hornmel spiced Meat. It wasn't selling well. He had he
had he had it figured out, uh and he later
on kind of messed a little bit with the recipe
to come up with spam as we know it today.
But there was something similar called Hormel Spiced ham. So
he was having trouble um coming up with the name.
(12:03):
And he had a New Year's Eve party, right yeah,
Well he had a contest before the party, yeah, and
it yielded nothing. It yielded names like brunch and Baby
Grand and he was like, we can do better than that, um,
And we should probably give a shout out to Nito Rama,
who had a pretty good little blog post about it
was that where he saw it. Um, so hormels like,
(12:26):
we need to do better than that. I'm gonna have
a New Year's Eve party, and I'm gonna tell my
guests that I will. They can get a free drink
for every name they write down on a slip of paper.
And there's a quote from him saying that along about
the fourth or fifth drink, people started using their imaginations. Right. Uh.
And finally a an actor named what was his name, Chuck?
(12:48):
His name was Kenneth d A I g n e
a U Danielle daniel We'll go with that, Okay. He
was a Broadway actor, I believe. Um, he came up
with the name spam and one bucks. He had like
five slow gin fizzles and came up with spam right,
(13:10):
one hundred cash right, and that was it. I guess
he had to sign away the rights. Oh, I'm sure
right there on the spot. Yeah, He's like, I'll sign it, yeah, spam. Yeah.
I wonder how he came up with it, besides the
fact that he was drunk. It's introuded in mystery. It's
lost to mysteries a lot of If you go onto
the Spam official site and they're like, what what does
(13:31):
spam mean? And there's a lot of there's a lot
of conjecture that it means things like um uh something
posing his meat, like it's an acronym um, or that
it's a it stands for stuff pork and meat. Okay,
it's another acronym. Apparently there's dirty ones too. Yeah. But
(13:53):
what we need to point out though, again that spam
is not some weird mystery meat with all sorts of
like disgusting part. It's it's unless you think pork shoulder
and ham is disgusting, right, I mean, we know what's
in it. That's true. Um, So apparently it's lost to time.
They think it's just basically taking spiced and ham and
(14:14):
put together. But again, if you go on the official
spam website, they're like, spam meat, spam, Now that's what
we're going with. Sure. Um So that's where the name
(14:49):
came from. That Hormel trademarked it, introduced it to the public,
and it started to take off pretty well. But it
was actually aided by um in a an obscure act
by the US Congress that that was past in one
called the Lend Lease Act. Right, that has something to
(15:10):
do with the exportation it did so in America was
neutral still in the in what was becoming World War Two,
and they the Congress passed the Lend Lease Act saying
that the President had the authority to send weapons, supplies,
and food to countries that were fighting the Access Power,
which effectively reversed the neutrout neutral stance we had. Right. Yeah,
(15:32):
and spam is a good thing to send because it's
you can have it forever, it's in a can that
can get dented up, and soldiers apparently could eat a
lot of it, and not just soldiers, people in other
countries in restaurants. They shipped a hundred million pounds of
this stuff. Yeah, So Hormel was like, hey, we've got
a bunch of stuff for you, give us a contract,
(15:54):
and they did, and it became ubiquitous in World War two,
especially in the CIFIC. Right, So, two things are going
on with the g I s. Well, two things are
going on with World War Two. One, the g i's
are eating this stuff or what they thought was spam, morning,
noon and night and hated it because they've got so
(16:14):
sick of it. And then secondly, it was also being
shipped to countries that were part of the Pacific and
European theaters. And then after World War Two stopped, these
people had developed a taste for spam. Well, even the
soldiers that hated it came back and they were kind
of like, boy, now I kind of misspam. They could
really go persone spam exactly. So World War two is
like this incredibly strange, perfect marketing platform for spam. Yeah. Uh.
(16:39):
And then right after World War Two, apparently J. Hormel
recognized what was going on and he um let out
another advertising blitz back here in the States, and that
was a household name. From that point on, it was
a perfect sporm if you will. Sorry. Uh, Now, does
that explain why it's popular in Hawaii and Japan because
the Pacific thing? Yeah, and especial sleep in Okinawa. Um,
(17:01):
there've been marines there forever and um Apparently anywhere the
American military goes and has like a very big open
presence in the local population, spam is a big thing.
But for some reason, people of Asian descent are crazy
for spam. Well they make it. I know in Hawaii
they have it and like sushi rolls and stuff like that.
Imagine they do in Japan too. Yeah, it's um. I
(17:23):
haven't seen it in Japan. It's called um sam spam musubi.
It's slices spam on a slab of rice wrapped in newry,
which is a seaweed. There's your not even like avocado
or row or anything like that. It's spam. Man, Is
it cooked or is it raw? It looked cooked in
(17:45):
the picture I saw. Well, I'm sure you can find
it anyway. You're talk cooked. But it was like cooked again, right, okay? Um.
And in in Hawaii also Burger King and McDonald's you
can find like spam, rice and eggs on their menu
their breakfast. Man. You it's everywhere it is. It is ubiquitous.
And they're nearing their eight billiant can of spam pushing
(18:07):
it out there. Yeah, all right, so that's the history.
Oh we should also say the Hormel Corporation is um
often like alleged often has alleged unfair labor practices and
stuff like that these days. Um. But J. Hormel was
dubbed by I think Fortune magazine the red Capitalist because
(18:29):
he was really progressive with labor relations in a good way. Yeah.
There was like a three day strike once and He
had a platform built so he could meet with the
labor leaders, and he hammered out things like UM an
annual wage, uh A, fifty two weeks notice before termination
for workers a year, like a year from now you're
(18:50):
going to be laid off, UM profit sharing, all this
stuff that was unheard of. He became like a really
like and he managed to create really good relations with
his employees, which helped, you know, get them to really
work hard to turn this stuff out. I'd say fifty
two weeks is almost foolish as an employer, Yeah, because
when it near, it's like, no, no, we need to
(19:11):
don't worry about that. Yeah, all right, So that's the
spam history. Now we should talk a little bit, Josh
about spam production because it's pretty neat. Oh, like we said, Austin,
Minnesota and Freemont, Nebraska's where it's made here in the States.
And it is such a highly automated process that apparently
it only takes thirteen workers to run the spam factory.
And imagine a lot of those are shaving trimming ham
(19:34):
because Ed says, pig pieces arrive at the plant machines
the street. Yeah, they grow, the grow the pigs they
they grow and kill the pigs across the street. The
machines removed the pork from the bone, but the ham
is trimmed by hand. Uh. They grind it up into
(19:55):
eight thousand pound batches, flash, cool it, blend it and
mix it with the other stuff, and then pipe it place.
Love it when meat is pipe pipe it to a
conveyor belt where it's pumped in a can and sealed
shut right off the bat right, and then it's cooked. Right.
It is cooked in these in the can. It's cooked
in the can right in these six story cookers that
(20:19):
can hold up to like sixty six thousand cans at
a time, which is something because I think they they
all of the um the capacity for all of I
think five spam factories is something like umto thousand cans
an hour, so they need this huge capacity to cook
that many cans at once. Your stomachs growling, Sam right now.
(20:44):
I almost I thought about bringing some in because we
kind of regretted with the Twinkie cast not eating Twinkies
live on the air. But um, yeah, spam, Jerry, do
you have any spam? She's fresh out, Okay, nothing fresh
about it. So it is cooked in the can that
hills the bacteria and obviously cooks it, wash it and
cool it, and then applied the plastic label. Used to
(21:07):
be lithographed on the can itself, which I remember, and
it had a different picture. It had a loaf of
spam with clothes in it, and now it's a spam burger.
I prefer the old picture. Yeah, and that the lithic
the lithograph one away, and I think and they went
with probably the cheaper plastic rap on the can. I
imagine that's why they did it. Lithography is not cheap um.
(21:29):
And then it is shipped all over the country and
then they license it, like I guess they they probably
don't ship it all, well, they probably should it. You
know the ones here, the two and the one in
Nebraska and the one in Minnesota supply North America, South America,
and Australia. Okay, Yeah, And they say on the Hormet website,
if you've ever wondered what spam tastes like, it is
(21:50):
a quote wonderful combination of a savory, salty, sweet taste
that will make your taste buds dance. And now they
did a lot of self promotion on the official website
if you ask me dance and tastes. Oh yeah, of course.
It was like did you go through all the questions?
It was like, how should I eat spam? Eat delicious spam?
Anyway you deliciously spamily want to spam? Uh. They have
(22:14):
a museum, of course, the Spam Museum, which is free,
which is as it should be, and it sounds awesome.
Did you read the Roadside America article on it. Yeah,
and I looked at some of the pictures too. It's
it's cool, like it's a cool museum. There was one
guide on the Roadside America article named John who seemed
to tell it like it is like he talked about
(22:34):
the hog place across the streets, like they slaughter twenty
thousand head a hog across the street there every day.
It's like at the spam meats you. That's in the
spam Museum. It was one of the guides, and apparently
they employee retired spam factory workers as guides. And this
guy was just like a straight shooter, right yeah, So
(22:56):
if you go, you should ask for John. That's what
I That's what I gathered. I can't wait to hear
from people from Minnesota about this that live near there.
I wonder what the man the smell that gives. Uh.
So let's get to the health benefits of a spam.
It's not healthy, it's not apparently a twelve ounce cam.
(23:18):
Wh's just the standard size. There's two sides, the twelve
and the nine than the seven. But if you're eating spam,
you're you're going for the twelve. Yeah, that's the one
you normally see. The twelve ounce can. That little twelve
ounce can has six servings in it. Yeah, I would
say that's about a slice roughly, wouldn't you say? Yeah,
I'd say, like a sort of thick ish slice is
(23:39):
a serving. So there's six of them in there. So
so one slice basically has thirty a third of your
recommended intake of daily of sodium. Yes, so a full
can is a hundred ninety percent of your daily sodium
and take. Yeah, that's two times what you should be eating. Yes. Um,
it has a lot of saturated fat. A lot of fat,
(24:00):
and a lot of it is saturated n grams and
in total in the twelve ounce can, which and you
always got to do the big Matt comparison, A single
can of spam is a little bit less than three
big max stuffed in that little can. Uh. They do
have reduced sodium and light versions. They do. We need
(24:21):
to point that out. Who's eating that the health conscious
fam eater? Yeah, I mean surely people are eating it. Yeah,
they're going down the grocery store Asland going like I
could go from the spam, but I really should watch
myself and I'll get the spam light. All right, I
need to point out in fairness, we're making some jokes
here about spam eaters, but there are poor people who
(24:43):
rely on things like spam, and I just wanted to
point that. I don't want people to right and say,
you know, like like I used to have one on
one or to the Golden Pantry and Athens, I would
have these daily like cheap hourly workers come in and
buy like potted meat and spam. A sausage is huge,
and it would spend literally like the little pack of
crackers and the pot of meat was their lunch and
they would spend like a dollar fifty on it because
(25:05):
it couldn't afford anything else. So we're not making fun
of those people. Were making fun of rich people who
eat spam. I'm not making fun of anybody. Okay, um,
and actually, if you bring that up, because you brought
that up, spam was born out of the depression, Yeah,
well exact. Apparently, now during the recession, it's production is
through the roof again. It's demand is just crazy for it.
(25:25):
So we're not mocking but spam and they seem to
take it. I mean, it's all advertising for them. They've
embraced the the culture of spam and everything that it entails.
And it's just so it's the cheesiest meat around. It's
impossible to not make fun of, do you know what
I mean? Yeah, sure, it's a pop culture, I und
(25:46):
which is why we're doing this podcast exactly. We're not
doing one on well. I guess we could do one
of being a sausages also made by Hormel i ate
one not too long ago at the School of Humans. Wow,
they served ving A sausages at their little rat party.
Nice and h They taste exactly the same as I remember.
(26:06):
I've never tasted one, but I can tell just by
looking at it exactly what it tastes like, sort of
Bolognay esque in a tube. Two. Alright, So there has
(27:02):
been some research that suggests that potted and processed meats
might increase the risk of cancer. Yes, the FDA still
says no, No, it's fine, but there's two. Five was
a big year for that was that the University Hawaii study. Yeah,
and they found that six your sixty more likely developed
(27:22):
pancreatic cancer if you consume large amounts of processed meats.
And the reason why is because that sodium nitrite. That's
what they think sodium well, this is this is why
they think it. That's correlated. Right, Sodium nitrite itself is
not a core carcinogen, that that preservative that they put
in UM. But if you combine nitrite with amines, and
(27:46):
amines are found in meat UM. When they combine and
they're metabolizing, they combine, they form nitros SA means nitrosamines. Yeah, yeah, man,
I wish I would have said that right the first time.
Those are cariscinogen. Most of them are UM. I can't
remember who did it, but somebody sampled three d UM
(28:06):
nitros amans and them were carcinogenic UM. So we can
make as as far as people think um nitrite into nitrosen.
Nitrosam means so if we're eating cured meat, we're converting
it into a carcinogen in our body. That's the fear.
(28:28):
Cured meat or process process cured meat, but anything that
has um sodium nitrite in it, bacon, cooking bacon makes
it carcinogenic by under this logic. So there isn't like
a direct um causal link, which is why the FDA
is not doing anything. Is price surprised, but the logic
is there. That's where the fear comes from. Okay, that's
(28:49):
where the fear sets in. And we mentioned that that
was done by the University of Hawaii, and that is because,
as we said, Hawaii and Hawaiians love their spam. Do
you have any stats on that? Yeah? What was it? Uh?
I think the for every Hawaiian they's six pounds of
(29:09):
spam per year. I think so they definitely eat I'm sorry,
three pounds. So so I've seen different numbers here. I
saw six cans per person per year. If you spread
it out across the population evenly as a whole, the
state eats eight million of the hundred million cans that
are made UH that are consumed in the US every year,
(29:33):
which seems low. Yeah, I got all sorts of It's
all over the place. The numbers are all over the place,
but Hawaii leads the nation in spam consumption. Well, and
they said it's far and away, so they didn't They
didn't tell me who was second place. Um, I imagine
Georgia ranks. It's probably up there scrapple. I'll bet Georgia
leads in scrapple consumption. I bet California is pretty low
(29:56):
on the list of space so um. But yes, Hawai,
it's crazy for you if you can find it in
a McDonald's. Uh, it's it means that it's part of
your local culture. And remember in fifty First Dates it
was a big, big thing. Uh sort of saw that,
but don't remember the spam references. It was, Yeah, anytime
they were at the restaurant, there was like some spam joke. Okay,
(30:19):
I think I might have checked out it, like The
First State. It was a cute movie that drew Barrymore.
I love her. We have to mention Monty Python's Flying
Circus because they a had the Broadway show or have
spam a lot running. I think so somewhere. I'm sure
(30:39):
it's on the road, big hit. And in the nineteen
seventies they're awesome show. The Flying Circus was. They had
a very famous skit about spam. Did you watch it? Yeah?
I watch it at end of the day. I'd seen
it before. I think my favorite part is the beginning
when the couple just comes down on wires into the chairs. Yeah,
I liked Who played the wife? Was it Terry Gilliam now? Uh?
(31:01):
I think it? Oh shoot, I can't remember his name.
The other Terry Terry Jones maybe, Okay, I'm not sure.
He was hilarious in it. And the joke was that
there's a spam is on the menu all over the
place in this diner in England, and that there's also
a big group of Vikings that starts singing a spam
(31:24):
song in the diner. It's just just just type in
money Python spam and go for the one that has
three million views. Is vintage Um A little uh back
to the history for a second. Um Hormel was so
involved in the war effort that they had a wartime
mascot called Slamming Spammy. I did not see that, which
(31:44):
was an armed pig throwing grenades. Really ostensibly at Um Hitler,
oh of course, And to Joe, sure, yeah Hitler, Yeah,
you gotta throw spam a hitler. No throwing grenades. Oh,
they weren't made of spam. No, they were grenades. Okay,
he was like he didn't even look like a cute pig.
(32:05):
He looked like a like the kind of pig you'd
see like painted on the front of an airplane in
World War Two. Okay, I thought it. They were throwing
like spam grenades. No, No, you wanted to keep the
spam from the Nazis. Yeah, you don't want them to
want You want to ring death upon them, not spam,
right right, that makes sense, although if you dropped spam
from high enough it would kill you. Yeah, I guess
(32:27):
it wouldn't be very good marketing if they're throwing spam,
just trying to uh what else we got we have? Well,
we should talk about the email um version of spam
and where that came from. The story I got is
that in the early days of the internets, remember bulletin boards,
(32:49):
if a bulletin board user wanted to scroll you off
the screen, they just started typing spam and copy pasting
it until you were removed from the screen. That's what
I heard. That's a good one. And then and they
got that from the Monty Python thing evidently, and then
early chat rooms same thing. Uh that it was initially
(33:11):
called flooding, and then simply spamming, and then eventually the
email version came around. And it does not stand for stupid,
pointless annoying message. Yeah, that's stupid. That's just a fault.
So that makes me want to beat someone up. What
else we got? Uh? You? My personal experience of spam
(33:33):
has been pretty pleasant. Let's hear. Um, let's see, I've
had it in curry. It's very, very good in curry
with rice nice. Um. I was in Switzerland once I
had metzker Rosti, which is one of the greatest things
I've ever had in my entire life. It's um like
fried hash brown potatoes, slice of fried spam, fried eggs,
(33:55):
and then this divine gravy sounds so good and I
ate that as often as it could. Surely I've mentioned
it before. Mets he throws some French fries on there,
and your permanes. Yeah, I've never had permanes. Uh. Muppet
Treasure Island featured a character UM called spam s p
(34:16):
a apostrophe A m is that what that was? On? Yeah?
And he was a big wart hog who also wore
a necklace of shrunken pigheads, so that kind of ties
back in when their shrunken head thing. So he was nuts.
He was nuts, and it's The Hormel Company sued the
Jim Hinton Company for quote a noxious appealing wild boar
(34:40):
who was quote intentionally portrayed to be evil in poor
sign form named Sam. I guess they called him spam
and the Hinton company was like, we're just kidding around,
like can we settle this. It's get a sense of humor.
And I think it was settled. I don't. I don't
think either that or they just lost the lawsuit. I
got a world record for you. Oh yeah, let's hear
(35:03):
Richard Lefevre orlefarv eight six pounds of spam in twelve minutes. Wow,
and I think he holds the record. Still wait, hold on,
you keep talking. I'm gonna do some math. And there
is uh if you want to go. There are different
um spam festivals, but I think the big daddy is
in Waikiki, the waiki Ki Spam Jam. Um. They're just
(35:24):
tell their eighth one in April, and I believe they
hold it every year in April, and that is where
lovers of spam congregate two trade recipes and uh spam
related products like t shirts and mugs and Christmas ornaments
and just all things spam. There's spam sculpting contests to um,
how many? How how fast did that guy eat six
pounds twelve minutes? He ate um eight cans of spam,
(35:49):
eight twelve ounce cannons of spam in twelve minutes. Then
so what's that? What's the sodium in that? Oh? I
didn't do that math. Well, if that was two it
of your daily intake in a can. So he ate
eight of his sodium intake for the day in twelve minutes,
and he loved to tell about it as far as
(36:11):
I know. Yeah, he's alive, and well, well let's spam.
I got nothing else. You know, I would like to
do some time Barbie. I'll bet that would be fascinating.
That lawsuit you mentioned like made me think of Barbie.
Mattel loves to sue anybody and everybody. They can you
just want to push push their buttons. No, it's just interesting. Yeah,
we've had um I sort of like these pop culture ones.
(36:33):
We had someone say we should do peanuts, Charles Schultz's Peanuts.
You know, I looked into that and I may be
writing the articles, So maybe we'll do that. That would
be awesome. Yeah, and yeah, we're long overdue for the
Doctor Sue podcast too. Okay, well, there you go. Keep
listening because it will eventually get better. Okay, that's what
we just basically promised. If you want to learn more
(36:54):
about spam and read about Ed Grabanowski's take on it.
He tries it the first time while he's writing this article,
and there's a step by step picture graph of how
to make fried spam and cheese sandwich. Just type spam. Actually,
we should probably do everybody a favor. Go to your
(37:15):
favorite search engine, type spam food and then how stuff works,
and it will bring up the spam article. Is it
the number one hit? It's it's it's up there, but
it's tough to find on our site because so much
computer spam articles. Uh, do that and and then go
into the handy search bar and type whatever you want.
(37:37):
And I said handy search bar, So that means it's
time for listening. Mail. Yes, Josh, I'm gonna call this.
Uh From Kristen, our sixteen year old fan from Toronto,
which is in Canada. She has. She sent us a
really nice email about how she listens to it with
her family and how she learns things and all the
different things she's learned, And then she got to a
(37:59):
PS which I'll skipped to PS. I've always wondered, how
do you guys distribute your information so evenly between the
two of you. Maybe it's just me, but I remember
an elementary school almost every group presentation ended in either
tears or a fight because someone spoke more than their
fair share. I know you guys aren't in the fifth
grade anymore, but you seem like nice civil guys. But
(38:21):
be honest, have you ever had any disagreements off the
air over someone stealing the thunder? And if you haven't,
how do you avoid that? Because your listeners would want
to know? But it's on the spot. Yeah, I think
it's just it's equitable. You know, some shows might speak
a little more some Josh does, and it's just it
(38:43):
does no good. I think you grow up a little
bit and you realize this, just it's silly to think
of things like that. Yeah, And I think by doing that,
we've just kind of even out. And I think Also,
if one of us gets the impression that we're talking
too much, we usually tee the other or not. Yeah,
that's to mutch it it's gonna be a boring answer,
wouldn't it, Toda, It's it's just not being in fifth
(39:04):
grade anymore. I think I remember. I don't think I
wanted the spotlight in the fifth grade, Like I think
I was one of those is like, I'll write it,
and you you were like the evil genies behind the
scenes dance puppets. Yeah. Yeah, So there's your answer, fish bulb.
If you have a question for us, you want to
look behind the scenes, that's fine. It was like Kristen,
(39:27):
Kristen from Toronto. Thank you Kristen from Toronto. Um, if
you have a question for us, you want to peek
behind the scenes, we'll answer anything, but we probably won't,
but we'll say we will because we like interesting questions.
You can send them to stuff podcast at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(39:52):
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com
M Hey everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's
s Y s K Selects, I've chosen spam. There's so
much to understand about spam, including one of my favorite
facts of our entire show that spam never goes bad.
So enjoy spam. Now, welcome to Stuff you Should Know
(00:27):
from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast on Josh Clark. I am Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and that's a stuff you
should know. Let's all go home. Some people are probably
(00:48):
already home. Well, go to bed, Okay. He told me
that in the email the other day. Go back to sleep.
I don't get that. You're just being goofye okay, just
lightning the moon like um, yeah, hey buddy, Hey Josh,
I have a story for you. All right, let's hear it.
So last November, not too many months ago, stop looking,
(01:12):
just listen, all right, Uh, there was a carnival cruise
liner that had a little fire. The Carnival Splendor was
on a seven day trip to the Mexican Riviera and
about forty four miles off the coast of Mexico, it
went adrift because of fire in the engine room just
knocked everything out so they lost power, which means it
(01:33):
was basically just like UM being on an abandoned boat,
but filled with people ghost ship a ghost ship and
filled with not just people, filled with two hundred and
fifty magicians who were on a convention. Um. That sounds
like my idea of hell on Earth. Okay. In addition
to the magicians, which apologies to any magicians listening, we
(01:56):
got sculptures melting. You've got magicians they can't find their
rabbits um. You've got UM toilets of their own flush.
You've got UM cabins that are UM stuffy. You have
UM warm food or warm drink. Yes, so Carnival in
their credit did UM give away free beer and wine
(02:17):
and all that. But it was warm. So for three
days all these people were just sitting adrift, right, and
a very just They weren't very happy. The US Navy
flew sorties out to this UM this ship and dropped
off supplies. They dropped off canned lump crab meat, they
(02:39):
dropped off pop tarts, they dropped off a little something
called spam canned meat. And when the ship was finally
I think towed back to uh Port. The people dubbed
this crazy vacation. What do you think do you think
they they dubbed it the hop tart Cation? Now do
(03:01):
you think they dubbed it the lump crab meat Cation. No,
of course they dubbed it spam cation two thousand ten. Yeah,
that's like Chad's story. Our buddy Chad was on a
cruise remember when he was younger, that the power went down.
He never told me this one. Oh yeah, he said
it was like Sodom and Gamora for a couple of days. Really,
Oh yeah, yeah. He said that people were having a
(03:23):
lot of fun and engaging inside of me, just in
Gamore and me having a good time, is what he
how he characterized it. That's crazy. I wonder if he
just didn't realize that it would have been like that
either way, with the power on or off. He was
just exposed to the power off part. I don't know.
He kind of made it seem like that with the
power down, people just it was a little nutty. It
was sort of like the end times are here. We're
(03:45):
on a cruise ship adrift, and let's just have have
fun with each other. Crazy. Yeah, I've never been on
a cruise, you know. Yeah, I'm not a cruise guy.
My dad he's turned into a cruise guy. He and uh,
he and my step mom and the cruises. But they
know my dad's way into him. Every time they go,
they come back with like a stomach bug or the
(04:06):
flu or just apparently they just it's like the epidemic
just goes through like crazy, like wildfire. My friend Andrew
in New York or from l A, but from the Bronx.
Andrew his uh, he showed me the tape of his graham.
I think it was his grandmother. Maybe it was his
aunt this, you know, like the old Jewish lady and
(04:27):
you talking about a cruise and she was explaining about
the cruise and how much it costs and how much
you get, and she was like, it almost costs, he said.
She said it costs more to stay at home, Like
she thought it was cheaper to go on a cruise
than to just live her life at home. Huh, well,
she doesn't live in New York. It was very funny though. Yeah,
I didn't tell her right, but Andrew, if you're listening,
I still remember that. And if you're listening, Chuck, sorry
(04:50):
for that one. I am. So that was spam cation
two thousand ten, and of course they named a spam
cation spam the food. By the way, if you were
hoping to hear about spam, email, sorry, we'll mention that.
We'll mention that briefly. But this is about the iconic
potted meat, right, which, by the way, Chuck. Next July
(05:10):
five will be it's seventy fifth birthday. July twelve, it
was interruced to the public twelve, it will have been
seventy five years since it was trademarked and technically born. Yeah.
And then now in twenty five years there will be
a spam tennial is what they'll probably call it, yes,
which will be fantastic. So, Chuck, um, let's talk about spam.
(05:34):
It's shrouded in mystery. No one has a clue what's
in it, or in what degree, or what it's made of.
So Chuck, what is spam? Josh? Spam is a pinkish
brick of meat that is canned and it is We
actually do know what's in it. It is pretty easy.
It's uh, pork shoulder and ham. Yeah, and ham's from
(05:55):
the butt, right, it's from the rear, hind legs and
rear end of a pig is what ham is. It's
also got a lot of salt because you need that
to help flavor and preserve the meat. And I got
a little bit of sugar for flavor and uh water
and then a tiny amount is what they say on
the Hormel site. They use the word tiny A tiny
(06:18):
amount of sodium nitrite, which keeps the botulism away. It's
keeps a botuli is um away. And it also keeps
the pink a shoe because if not, spam would turn gray,
which is not very appetizing. It's they're doing their best
to keep it pink. So um. I don't know that
the pinker the gray with spam specifically would make a difference.
(06:38):
But the grabster, for some reason who wrote this article
how spam um? He didn't He left out potato starts
for some reason. How was that in there? Yeah, potato
starts in there too. I did not see that spam
has a Hormel on the website says the shelf life
is indefinite. No, yes, wow, they say it's indefinite. They
recommend you eat it. It It is amped within three years
(07:01):
of the stamped. Because the flavor quote gradually declines. It
declines to the bottom of the can. Yeah, but it's
still abedible to shake it up. I'm sure it goes
right back. Yeah, that's really something. So should we do
history first or should we go into the production? Um,
we need to make sense to do history first. Well,
let's do history then. You know, before it was called spam,
(07:23):
there was a product on the market UM called Hormel
spiced ham. Did you know that? I did not know that.
And it wasn't selling very well. Well because Hormel was
in the fresh meat biz, right, And apparently it's just
it was hard to make your name in the fresh
meat biz because it was just kind of all the
same looking right, like, look at this turkey breast. It
(07:44):
looks like the turkey breast next to us. Imagine they
still have the same problem today. But they decided to
get into the can meat business. Well, that was George
Hormel's problem. Jay Hormel was the one who said, well,
let's just let's yeah, get into canned meat. And he
was the son of George the found or. And this
was in the late eighteen hundreds in Austin, Minnesota, Yes,
(08:05):
which is still the home of UM. Hormel. Yeah right,
and where it's one of two places it's produced. No,
there's a few others. Oh, they added, Yeah, there's a
care South Korea, Denmark, and I can't remember where the
third one is. Okay, in North America. You're right, Fremont,
Nebraska is the other place. So, Um, Jay Hormel is
(08:27):
I guess the he comes into his father's business and
just revamped him and probably kept it going today can
meat exactly. Um. One of the reasons why he got
into caned meat was because they were just not able
to make a name for themselves in the fresh meat,
but also because he came into the business um during
(08:48):
the depression, and there was a lot of thrifty nous
so people wanted something that um was cheap and delicious
that they could feed their family but meaty, right, and
jahor Mel gave him spiced ham. But it wasn't called
spam at first, like I said, it was called spiced ham, right. Yeah,
Well he had he had problems at first, um packaging
(09:10):
it because it took a lot of trial and error
because canning meat it was a pretty new fangled thing
at the time, and apparently sell walls the heat would call. So, yeah,
we need to point out that spam is cooked. Yeah,
it comes like you can eat it right out of
the can. It's I have already have you man? Not me?
(09:30):
I mean I haven't eaten spam literally since college. But
we used to take him on camping trips and fried up.
Well yeah, that's not right out of the can. No,
but I could also eat it out of the can circumstance.
I've never eaten it out of the can. Yeah, it's
you know, it's the tastes the same, but man fried
like I was remembering that taste today. I mean, it's
been twenty years, though probably not fifteen. It's been a
(09:51):
lot less than that for me. Really. Oh yeah, you
and his families from Okinawa and Okanowan's are crazy for
spam really. Oh yeah, like Hawaiian. Yeah, we'll get to
that too. Uh so, uh, the cell walls would break
down and release the water from the meat. So what
would you would have was as dry meat floating in water,
which is pretty gross. It's separate because the cells would lies.
(10:16):
That's right, It's just not good. So over time they
figured out the canning process, which meant a lot of
salt in the precise uh temperature that you need to
cook it at to preserve it to where it is moist.
And it also has to be mixed in cannon a vacuum,
which is really important. The key. That's the key. If
you yeah, if you mix it and can it in
(10:37):
a vacuum, you should be okay. And speaking of key,
remember when you needed a key to open it? No,
I wasn't alive, then you are. It wasn't that long ago.
I wasn't paying attention to spam. Yeah, there was a key.
It came attached to the can, and you would take
off the key and insert into a little thing and
roll it back like I guess like old sardine cans
(10:57):
used to do the same thing. Okay, yeah, now I've
seen that in like cartoons from the sixties. But I
didn't know spam had that sam key before they went
I guess with the pole tablet? Was that like a
giveaway though, like a spam key, like you'd send off
for it or would they tell him at the story
came attached to the bottom of the can. Oh, gotcha, man,
those are the good old days. It was self contained
(11:18):
and fairly explainatory. All right, So J Hormel figures out
how to can meat. But he's not. He's he was
a born marketer. The guy sold um. He came up
with Hormel's Chili kuncarnate. He hired a twenty piece Mexican
band to go around the country like touting it's goodness,
and that was Los Lobos, right um and Gypsy Kings,
I think, and uh so like he would come up
(11:40):
with great publicity since he was good at marketing, but
he was he was hamstrung by U by the name
Hornmel spiced Meat. It wasn't selling well. He had he
had he had it figured out, uh and he later
on kind of messed a little bit with the recipe
to come up with spam as we know it today.
But there was something similar called Hormel Spiced ham. So
he was having trouble um coming up with the name.
(12:03):
And he had a New Year's Eve party, right yeah,
Well he had a contest before the party, yeah, and
it yielded nothing. It yielded names like brunch and Baby
Grand and he was like, we can do better than that, um,
And we should probably give a shout out to Nito Rama,
who had a pretty good little blog post about it
was that where he saw it. Um, so hormels like,
(12:26):
we need to do better than that. I'm gonna have
a New Year's Eve party, and I'm gonna tell my
guests that I will. They can get a free drink
for every name they write down on a slip of paper.
And there's a quote from him saying that along about
the fourth or fifth drink, people started using their imaginations. Right. Uh.
And finally a an actor named what was his name, Chuck?
(12:48):
His name was Kenneth d A I g n e
a U Danielle daniel We'll go with that, Okay. He
was a Broadway actor, I believe. Um, he came up
with the name spam and one bucks. He had like
five slow gin fizzles and came up with spam right,
(13:10):
one hundred cash right, and that was it. I guess
he had to sign away the rights. Oh, I'm sure
right there on the spot. Yeah, He's like, I'll sign it, yeah, spam. Yeah.
I wonder how he came up with it, besides the
fact that he was drunk. It's introuded in mystery. It's
lost to mysteries a lot of If you go onto
the Spam official site and they're like, what what does
(13:31):
spam mean? And there's a lot of there's a lot
of conjecture that it means things like um uh something
posing his meat, like it's an acronym um, or that
it's a it stands for stuff pork and meat. Okay,
it's another acronym. Apparently there's dirty ones too. Yeah. But
(13:53):
what we need to point out though, again that spam
is not some weird mystery meat with all sorts of
like disgusting part. It's it's unless you think pork shoulder
and ham is disgusting, right, I mean, we know what's
in it. That's true. Um, So apparently it's lost to time.
They think it's just basically taking spiced and ham and
(14:14):
put together. But again, if you go on the official
spam website, they're like, spam meat, spam, Now that's what
we're going with. Sure. Um So that's where the name
(14:49):
came from. That Hormel trademarked it, introduced it to the public,
and it started to take off pretty well. But it
was actually aided by um in a an obscure act
by the US Congress that that was past in one
called the Lend Lease Act. Right, that has something to
(15:10):
do with the exportation it did so in America was
neutral still in the in what was becoming World War Two,
and they the Congress passed the Lend Lease Act saying
that the President had the authority to send weapons, supplies,
and food to countries that were fighting the Access Power,
which effectively reversed the neutrout neutral stance we had. Right. Yeah,
(15:32):
and spam is a good thing to send because it's
you can have it forever, it's in a can that
can get dented up, and soldiers apparently could eat a
lot of it, and not just soldiers, people in other
countries in restaurants. They shipped a hundred million pounds of
this stuff. Yeah, So Hormel was like, hey, we've got
a bunch of stuff for you, give us a contract,
(15:54):
and they did, and it became ubiquitous in World War two,
especially in the CIFIC. Right, So, two things are going
on with the g I s. Well, two things are
going on with World War Two. One, the g i's
are eating this stuff or what they thought was spam, morning,
noon and night and hated it because they've got so
(16:14):
sick of it. And then secondly, it was also being
shipped to countries that were part of the Pacific and
European theaters. And then after World War Two stopped, these
people had developed a taste for spam. Well, even the
soldiers that hated it came back and they were kind
of like, boy, now I kind of misspam. They could
really go persone spam exactly. So World War two is
like this incredibly strange, perfect marketing platform for spam. Yeah. Uh.
(16:39):
And then right after World War Two, apparently J. Hormel
recognized what was going on and he um let out
another advertising blitz back here in the States, and that
was a household name. From that point on, it was
a perfect sporm if you will. Sorry. Uh, Now, does
that explain why it's popular in Hawaii and Japan because
the Pacific thing? Yeah, and especial sleep in Okinawa. Um,
(17:01):
there've been marines there forever and um Apparently anywhere the
American military goes and has like a very big open
presence in the local population, spam is a big thing.
But for some reason, people of Asian descent are crazy
for spam. Well they make it. I know in Hawaii
they have it and like sushi rolls and stuff like that.
Imagine they do in Japan too. Yeah, it's um. I
(17:23):
haven't seen it in Japan. It's called um sam spam musubi.
It's slices spam on a slab of rice wrapped in newry,
which is a seaweed. There's your not even like avocado
or row or anything like that. It's spam. Man, Is
it cooked or is it raw? It looked cooked in
(17:45):
the picture I saw. Well, I'm sure you can find
it anyway. You're talk cooked. But it was like cooked again, right, okay? Um.
And in in Hawaii also Burger King and McDonald's you
can find like spam, rice and eggs on their menu
their breakfast. Man. You it's everywhere it is. It is ubiquitous.
And they're nearing their eight billiant can of spam pushing
(18:07):
it out there. Yeah, all right, so that's the history.
Oh we should also say the Hormel Corporation is um
often like alleged often has alleged unfair labor practices and
stuff like that these days. Um. But J. Hormel was
dubbed by I think Fortune magazine the red Capitalist because
(18:29):
he was really progressive with labor relations in a good way. Yeah.
There was like a three day strike once and He
had a platform built so he could meet with the
labor leaders, and he hammered out things like UM an
annual wage, uh A, fifty two weeks notice before termination
for workers a year, like a year from now you're
(18:50):
going to be laid off, UM profit sharing, all this
stuff that was unheard of. He became like a really
like and he managed to create really good relations with
his employees, which helped, you know, get them to really
work hard to turn this stuff out. I'd say fifty
two weeks is almost foolish as an employer, Yeah, because
when it near, it's like, no, no, we need to
(19:11):
don't worry about that. Yeah, all right, So that's the
spam history. Now we should talk a little bit, Josh
about spam production because it's pretty neat. Oh, like we said, Austin,
Minnesota and Freemont, Nebraska's where it's made here in the States.
And it is such a highly automated process that apparently
it only takes thirteen workers to run the spam factory.
And imagine a lot of those are shaving trimming ham
(19:34):
because Ed says, pig pieces arrive at the plant machines
the street. Yeah, they grow, the grow the pigs they
they grow and kill the pigs across the street. The
machines removed the pork from the bone, but the ham
is trimmed by hand. Uh. They grind it up into
(19:55):
eight thousand pound batches, flash, cool it, blend it and
mix it with the other stuff, and then pipe it place.
Love it when meat is pipe pipe it to a
conveyor belt where it's pumped in a can and sealed
shut right off the bat right, and then it's cooked. Right.
It is cooked in these in the can. It's cooked
in the can right in these six story cookers that
(20:19):
can hold up to like sixty six thousand cans at
a time, which is something because I think they they
all of the um the capacity for all of I
think five spam factories is something like umto thousand cans
an hour, so they need this huge capacity to cook
that many cans at once. Your stomachs growling, Sam right now.
(20:44):
I almost I thought about bringing some in because we
kind of regretted with the Twinkie cast not eating Twinkies
live on the air. But um, yeah, spam, Jerry, do
you have any spam? She's fresh out, Okay, nothing fresh
about it. So it is cooked in the can that
hills the bacteria and obviously cooks it, wash it and
cool it, and then applied the plastic label. Used to
(21:07):
be lithographed on the can itself, which I remember, and
it had a different picture. It had a loaf of
spam with clothes in it, and now it's a spam burger.
I prefer the old picture. Yeah, and that the lithic
the lithograph one away, and I think and they went
with probably the cheaper plastic rap on the can. I
imagine that's why they did it. Lithography is not cheap um.
(21:29):
And then it is shipped all over the country and
then they license it, like I guess they they probably
don't ship it all, well, they probably should it. You
know the ones here, the two and the one in
Nebraska and the one in Minnesota supply North America, South America,
and Australia. Okay, Yeah, And they say on the Hormet website,
if you've ever wondered what spam tastes like, it is
(21:50):
a quote wonderful combination of a savory, salty, sweet taste
that will make your taste buds dance. And now they
did a lot of self promotion on the official website
if you ask me dance and tastes. Oh yeah, of course.
It was like did you go through all the questions?
It was like, how should I eat spam? Eat delicious spam?
Anyway you deliciously spamily want to spam? Uh. They have
(22:14):
a museum, of course, the Spam Museum, which is free,
which is as it should be, and it sounds awesome.
Did you read the Roadside America article on it. Yeah,
and I looked at some of the pictures too. It's
it's cool, like it's a cool museum. There was one
guide on the Roadside America article named John who seemed
to tell it like it is like he talked about
(22:34):
the hog place across the streets, like they slaughter twenty
thousand head a hog across the street there every day.
It's like at the spam meats you. That's in the
spam Museum. It was one of the guides, and apparently
they employee retired spam factory workers as guides. And this
guy was just like a straight shooter, right yeah, So
(22:56):
if you go, you should ask for John. That's what
I That's what I gathered. I can't wait to hear
from people from Minnesota about this that live near there.
I wonder what the man the smell that gives. Uh.
So let's get to the health benefits of a spam.
It's not healthy, it's not apparently a twelve ounce cam.
(23:18):
Wh's just the standard size. There's two sides, the twelve
and the nine than the seven. But if you're eating spam,
you're you're going for the twelve. Yeah, that's the one
you normally see. The twelve ounce can. That little twelve
ounce can has six servings in it. Yeah, I would
say that's about a slice roughly, wouldn't you say? Yeah,
I'd say, like a sort of thick ish slice is
(23:39):
a serving. So there's six of them in there. So
so one slice basically has thirty a third of your
recommended intake of daily of sodium. Yes, so a full
can is a hundred ninety percent of your daily sodium
and take. Yeah, that's two times what you should be eating. Yes. Um,
it has a lot of saturated fat. A lot of fat,
(24:00):
and a lot of it is saturated n grams and
in total in the twelve ounce can, which and you
always got to do the big Matt comparison, A single
can of spam is a little bit less than three
big max stuffed in that little can. Uh. They do
have reduced sodium and light versions. They do. We need
(24:21):
to point that out. Who's eating that the health conscious
fam eater? Yeah, I mean surely people are eating it. Yeah,
they're going down the grocery store Asland going like I
could go from the spam, but I really should watch
myself and I'll get the spam light. All right, I
need to point out in fairness, we're making some jokes
here about spam eaters, but there are poor people who
(24:43):
rely on things like spam, and I just wanted to
point that. I don't want people to right and say,
you know, like like I used to have one on
one or to the Golden Pantry and Athens, I would
have these daily like cheap hourly workers come in and
buy like potted meat and spam. A sausage is huge,
and it would spend literally like the little pack of
crackers and the pot of meat was their lunch and
they would spend like a dollar fifty on it because
(25:05):
it couldn't afford anything else. So we're not making fun
of those people. Were making fun of rich people who
eat spam. I'm not making fun of anybody. Okay, um,
and actually, if you bring that up, because you brought
that up, spam was born out of the depression, Yeah,
well exact. Apparently, now during the recession, it's production is
through the roof again. It's demand is just crazy for it.
(25:25):
So we're not mocking but spam and they seem to
take it. I mean, it's all advertising for them. They've
embraced the the culture of spam and everything that it entails.
And it's just so it's the cheesiest meat around. It's
impossible to not make fun of, do you know what
I mean? Yeah, sure, it's a pop culture, I und
(25:46):
which is why we're doing this podcast exactly. We're not
doing one on well. I guess we could do one
of being a sausages also made by Hormel i ate
one not too long ago at the School of Humans. Wow,
they served ving A sausages at their little rat party.
Nice and h They taste exactly the same as I remember.
(26:06):
I've never tasted one, but I can tell just by
looking at it exactly what it tastes like, sort of
Bolognay esque in a tube. Two. Alright, So there has
(27:02):
been some research that suggests that potted and processed meats
might increase the risk of cancer. Yes, the FDA still
says no, No, it's fine, but there's two. Five was
a big year for that was that the University Hawaii study. Yeah,
and they found that six your sixty more likely developed
(27:22):
pancreatic cancer if you consume large amounts of processed meats.
And the reason why is because that sodium nitrite. That's
what they think sodium well, this is this is why
they think it. That's correlated. Right, Sodium nitrite itself is
not a core carcinogen, that that preservative that they put
in UM. But if you combine nitrite with amines, and
(27:46):
amines are found in meat UM. When they combine and
they're metabolizing, they combine, they form nitros SA means nitrosamines. Yeah, yeah, man,
I wish I would have said that right the first time.
Those are cariscinogen. Most of them are UM. I can't
remember who did it, but somebody sampled three d UM
(28:06):
nitros amans and them were carcinogenic UM. So we can
make as as far as people think um nitrite into nitrosen.
Nitrosam means so if we're eating cured meat, we're converting
it into a carcinogen in our body. That's the fear.
(28:28):
Cured meat or process process cured meat, but anything that
has um sodium nitrite in it, bacon, cooking bacon makes
it carcinogenic by under this logic. So there isn't like
a direct um causal link, which is why the FDA
is not doing anything. Is price surprised, but the logic
is there. That's where the fear comes from. Okay, that's
(28:49):
where the fear sets in. And we mentioned that that
was done by the University of Hawaii, and that is because,
as we said, Hawaii and Hawaiians love their spam. Do
you have any stats on that? Yeah? What was it? Uh?
I think the for every Hawaiian they's six pounds of
(29:09):
spam per year. I think so they definitely eat I'm sorry,
three pounds. So so I've seen different numbers here. I
saw six cans per person per year. If you spread
it out across the population evenly as a whole, the
state eats eight million of the hundred million cans that
are made UH that are consumed in the US every year,
(29:33):
which seems low. Yeah, I got all sorts of It's
all over the place. The numbers are all over the place,
but Hawaii leads the nation in spam consumption. Well, and
they said it's far and away, so they didn't They
didn't tell me who was second place. Um, I imagine
Georgia ranks. It's probably up there scrapple. I'll bet Georgia
leads in scrapple consumption. I bet California is pretty low
(29:56):
on the list of space so um. But yes, Hawai,
it's crazy for you if you can find it in
a McDonald's. Uh, it's it means that it's part of
your local culture. And remember in fifty First Dates it
was a big, big thing. Uh sort of saw that,
but don't remember the spam references. It was, Yeah, anytime
they were at the restaurant, there was like some spam joke. Okay,
(30:19):
I think I might have checked out it, like The
First State. It was a cute movie that drew Barrymore.
I love her. We have to mention Monty Python's Flying
Circus because they a had the Broadway show or have
spam a lot running. I think so somewhere. I'm sure
(30:39):
it's on the road, big hit. And in the nineteen
seventies they're awesome show. The Flying Circus was. They had
a very famous skit about spam. Did you watch it? Yeah?
I watch it at end of the day. I'd seen
it before. I think my favorite part is the beginning
when the couple just comes down on wires into the chairs. Yeah,
I liked Who played the wife? Was it Terry Gilliam now? Uh?
(31:01):
I think it? Oh shoot, I can't remember his name.
The other Terry Terry Jones maybe, Okay, I'm not sure.
He was hilarious in it. And the joke was that
there's a spam is on the menu all over the
place in this diner in England, and that there's also
a big group of Vikings that starts singing a spam
(31:24):
song in the diner. It's just just just type in
money Python spam and go for the one that has
three million views. Is vintage Um A little uh back
to the history for a second. Um Hormel was so
involved in the war effort that they had a wartime
mascot called Slamming Spammy. I did not see that, which
(31:44):
was an armed pig throwing grenades. Really ostensibly at Um Hitler,
oh of course, And to Joe, sure, yeah Hitler, Yeah,
you gotta throw spam a hitler. No throwing grenades. Oh,
they weren't made of spam. No, they were grenades. Okay,
he was like he didn't even look like a cute pig.
(32:05):
He looked like a like the kind of pig you'd
see like painted on the front of an airplane in
World War Two. Okay, I thought it. They were throwing
like spam grenades. No, No, you wanted to keep the
spam from the Nazis. Yeah, you don't want them to
want You want to ring death upon them, not spam,
right right, that makes sense, although if you dropped spam
from high enough it would kill you. Yeah, I guess
(32:27):
it wouldn't be very good marketing if they're throwing spam,
just trying to uh what else we got we have? Well,
we should talk about the email um version of spam
and where that came from. The story I got is
that in the early days of the internets, remember bulletin boards,
(32:49):
if a bulletin board user wanted to scroll you off
the screen, they just started typing spam and copy pasting
it until you were removed from the screen. That's what
I heard. That's a good one. And then and they
got that from the Monty Python thing evidently, and then
early chat rooms same thing. Uh that it was initially
(33:11):
called flooding, and then simply spamming, and then eventually the
email version came around. And it does not stand for stupid,
pointless annoying message. Yeah, that's stupid. That's just a fault.
So that makes me want to beat someone up. What
else we got? Uh? You? My personal experience of spam
(33:33):
has been pretty pleasant. Let's hear. Um, let's see, I've
had it in curry. It's very, very good in curry
with rice nice. Um. I was in Switzerland once I
had metzker Rosti, which is one of the greatest things
I've ever had in my entire life. It's um like
fried hash brown potatoes, slice of fried spam, fried eggs,
(33:55):
and then this divine gravy sounds so good and I
ate that as often as it could. Surely I've mentioned
it before. Mets he throws some French fries on there,
and your permanes. Yeah, I've never had permanes. Uh. Muppet
Treasure Island featured a character UM called spam s p
(34:16):
a apostrophe A m is that what that was? On? Yeah?
And he was a big wart hog who also wore
a necklace of shrunken pigheads, so that kind of ties
back in when their shrunken head thing. So he was nuts.
He was nuts, and it's The Hormel Company sued the
Jim Hinton Company for quote a noxious appealing wild boar
(34:40):
who was quote intentionally portrayed to be evil in poor
sign form named Sam. I guess they called him spam
and the Hinton company was like, we're just kidding around,
like can we settle this. It's get a sense of humor.
And I think it was settled. I don't. I don't
think either that or they just lost the lawsuit. I
got a world record for you. Oh yeah, let's hear
(35:03):
Richard Lefevre orlefarv eight six pounds of spam in twelve minutes. Wow,
and I think he holds the record. Still wait, hold on,
you keep talking. I'm gonna do some math. And there
is uh if you want to go. There are different
um spam festivals, but I think the big daddy is
in Waikiki, the waiki Ki Spam Jam. Um. They're just
(35:24):
tell their eighth one in April, and I believe they
hold it every year in April, and that is where
lovers of spam congregate two trade recipes and uh spam
related products like t shirts and mugs and Christmas ornaments
and just all things spam. There's spam sculpting contests to um,
how many? How how fast did that guy eat six
pounds twelve minutes? He ate um eight cans of spam,
(35:49):
eight twelve ounce cannons of spam in twelve minutes. Then
so what's that? What's the sodium in that? Oh? I
didn't do that math. Well, if that was two it
of your daily intake in a can. So he ate
eight of his sodium intake for the day in twelve minutes,
and he loved to tell about it as far as
(36:11):
I know. Yeah, he's alive, and well, well let's spam.
I got nothing else. You know, I would like to
do some time Barbie. I'll bet that would be fascinating.
That lawsuit you mentioned like made me think of Barbie.
Mattel loves to sue anybody and everybody. They can you
just want to push push their buttons. No, it's just interesting. Yeah,
we've had um I sort of like these pop culture ones.
(36:33):
We had someone say we should do peanuts, Charles Schultz's Peanuts.
You know, I looked into that and I may be
writing the articles, So maybe we'll do that. That would
be awesome. Yeah, and yeah, we're long overdue for the
Doctor Sue podcast too. Okay, well, there you go. Keep
listening because it will eventually get better. Okay, that's what
we just basically promised. If you want to learn more
(36:54):
about spam and read about Ed Grabanowski's take on it.
He tries it the first time while he's writing this article,
and there's a step by step picture graph of how
to make fried spam and cheese sandwich. Just type spam. Actually,
we should probably do everybody a favor. Go to your
(37:15):
favorite search engine, type spam food and then how stuff works,
and it will bring up the spam article. Is it
the number one hit? It's it's it's up there, but
it's tough to find on our site because so much
computer spam articles. Uh, do that and and then go
into the handy search bar and type whatever you want.
(37:37):
And I said handy search bar, So that means it's
time for listening. Mail. Yes, Josh, I'm gonna call this.
Uh From Kristen, our sixteen year old fan from Toronto,
which is in Canada. She has. She sent us a
really nice email about how she listens to it with
her family and how she learns things and all the
different things she's learned, And then she got to a
(37:59):
PS which I'll skipped to PS. I've always wondered, how
do you guys distribute your information so evenly between the
two of you. Maybe it's just me, but I remember
an elementary school almost every group presentation ended in either
tears or a fight because someone spoke more than their
fair share. I know you guys aren't in the fifth
grade anymore, but you seem like nice civil guys. But
(38:21):
be honest, have you ever had any disagreements off the
air over someone stealing the thunder? And if you haven't,
how do you avoid that? Because your listeners would want
to know? But it's on the spot. Yeah, I think
it's just it's equitable. You know, some shows might speak
a little more some Josh does, and it's just it
(38:43):
does no good. I think you grow up a little
bit and you realize this, just it's silly to think
of things like that. Yeah, And I think by doing that,
we've just kind of even out. And I think Also,
if one of us gets the impression that we're talking
too much, we usually tee the other or not. Yeah,
that's to mutch it it's gonna be a boring answer,
wouldn't it, Toda, It's it's just not being in fifth
(39:04):
grade anymore. I think I remember. I don't think I
wanted the spotlight in the fifth grade, Like I think
I was one of those is like, I'll write it,
and you you were like the evil genies behind the
scenes dance puppets. Yeah. Yeah, So there's your answer, fish bulb.
If you have a question for us, you want to
look behind the scenes, that's fine. It was like Kristen,
(39:27):
Kristen from Toronto. Thank you Kristen from Toronto. Um, if
you have a question for us, you want to peek
behind the scenes, we'll answer anything, but we probably won't,
but we'll say we will because we like interesting questions.
You can send them to stuff podcast at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(39:52):
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
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