SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAMMITY SPAM! SPAM! SPAM!

(Photo from spam.com)

No, Spam is not "the foie gras of the grocery store."

Last week, Claudia McNeilly made this unfit comparison in the National Post and she was thoroughly wrong for doing so. One is a delicacy, the other is not. One might be found in high-priced Michelin-Star restaurants, the other belongs in dinners, drive-ins, and dives. One is made by forcing geese to gorge on unhealthy amounts of food to fatten their livers, while the other ... well, it's what you consume (by choice), in unhealthy portions, to fatten your stomach. Both are delicious, in their own ways, but they're simply not on the same level.

What I can agree with McNeilly about, however, is that Spam isn't gross, it's just grossly underrated.

Embrace the Spam!

I came up with my own Spam-creation about a month ago; I didn't mark the date on my calendar but maybe I should have. So, if you're craving something offbeat and out of your comfort zone, then you need to try this out:

The Penney Spam-wich Serves 1-2 1 can of Spam 4 pieces of bread 1-2 tbsp of butter 3-4 tbsp of your favourite mustard Freshly ground black pepper & salt Slice the Spam, lengthwise, into 4 square slabs. Toast the 4 pieces of bread until they’re golden brown. Melt the butter in a fry pan on medium heat. Once the butter stops bubbling, add the slices of spam and nicely brown both sides. Place the cooked Spam onto 2 pieces of toast. Add freshly ground black pepper and a dash of salt to the meat. To the other slices of bread, liberally apply the mustard and complete your sandwiches.

My own craving for this wonderful beast of a meat was awakened after watching that classic Monty Python sketch - you know the one:

The "Spam" sketch - Monty Python's Flying Circus (1970)

This performance proved to be seminal moment in pop-culture history. Granted, British humour isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the "Spam" sketch transcends the boundaries of comedy, bending space and time, eventually working its way out of the Flying Circus and into the folders of your inbox. Anyone with an email account knows what I'm talking about, but I suppose few people think about the Pythons anymore when deleting their spam mail.

The comedy troupe deserves some obvious credit for defining the way we categorize our junk emails, but there's more to it than just a cafeteria full of vikings singing about specially processed American meat. Here's some brief history about spam mail from a Time magazine article in 2009:

Though it wasn't called spam until the 1980s ... the first unsolicited messages came over the wires as early as 1864, when telegraph lines were used to send dubious investment offers to wealthy Americans. The first modern spam was sent on ARPANET, the military computer network that preceded the Internet. In 1978, a man named Gary Turk sent an e-mail solicitation to 400 people, advertising his line of new computers. (Turk later said his methods proved so unpopular that it would be more than a decade before anyone would try again.) In late 1994, Usenet — a newsgroup precursor to the Internet — was inundated by an advertisement for the immigration-law services of Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel. Despite the ensuing outcry, the lawyers defended their practice, called their detractors anti–free speech "zealots" and wrote a book about the practice titled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway. Pandora's Box had been opened.

Now spam comprises the vast majority of e-mail messages sent — 78% of the 210 billion e-mails sent each day, according to one estimate. And 93 billion of these manage to get past the technical defenses like spam filters and blacklists. E-mail programs have gotten smarter, but spammers stay one step ahead, using disposable e-mail addresses and sending messages from farms of different computers around the world to avoid being blocked. The garbled text spammers load their messages with to get past e-mail filters sometimes approaches poetry: sites like spampoetry.org chronicle lines like "Confirm you won fund/ You get it without paying/ Urgent attention."

It pays to be delicious

Despite the unpopular cultural narrative this product comes wrapped in, Hormel Foods, the maker of Spam, is doing OK.

In 2016, according to Fortune, the company has increased its revenues from $5.4 billion to roughly $9.3 billion. Admittedly, much of that growth comes from a diverse range of new products - including kale and quinoa - but Spam is by far it's most widely-recognized brand.

Here's something else for all the Spam-haters to chew on: the company first introduced the product in 1937. So, if it really was that awful, there's no way Spam would have lasted for as long as it has - free-market forces would have killed it off. Then again, maybe people just have bad taste in food.

The reality is, right or wrong, a lot of people have a lot of love for Spam.

According to Bloomberg, in an article from about a year ago entitled "Beyond Spam," the product can be found in cupboards and pantries around the globe:

Spam is an international food, a staple in some 44 countries from the Philippines to England. In Hawaii, it’s a substitute for fresh tuna. In South Korea, a little tower of Spam cans is a traditional holiday gift, a vestige of U.S. military rations during the Korean War.

Get cooking

Can so many people be so wrong? Well, yes, of course, but that doesn't mean they are. Your food preferences are entirely subjective and everyone holds the right to be particular about what they put into their bodies. That doesn't mean you should turn up your nose when passing by Spam in the grocery store. No, it'll never be foie gras, but Spam is quite comfortable being what it is.

If you can't tolerate the duality and inner beauty of this iconic food, then maybe that says more about who you are. In that case, it's time to let go of your prejudices and expand your dinner diversity. Meat is meat. Where you see repulsive, slimy, pink goo stuffed into a can, others see flavour, opportunity, and hope. The ingredients are as simple as its packaging: pork with ham, salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and (my favourite) sodium nitrite.

For the readers who want to take the plunge, you can learn more about some Spam-inclusive recipes by clicking here and here. And if you have any Spam-creations of your own, I'd love to hear about them.

By the way, in case you missed it, Spam turned 80 this year. Happy birthday, Spam.