Anonymous Blogger Claims Spam ‘Sounds Silly,’ Calls for ‘Spam Purists’

Dear Readers,

I really do like Spam. Really!

(I’m talking about the food, not the junk email.)

I like to chop up Spam and boil it with ramen noodles, and then eat the ramen noodles and the Spam mixed together as a soup. Or Spam and ramen noodles without the water is good too.

I also like to mix Spam with macaroni and cheese. Mmmmm… that’s good.

Probably my favorite Spam-ified meal so far is a hot sandwich composed of toasted bread, sizzled Spam, fried eggs, and melted cheese. Yummm… I’m thinking about it right now.

But those three Spam-ified recipe ideas are only the tip of the iceberg! Spam is so versatile; your creative use of Spam is only limited by your imagination!

Here’s a list of 6 great things about Spam:

1. It’s pre-cooked! You can eat it right out of the can, if you want to. I prefer Spam hot, but it’s nice to know that I could eat it cold, if I wanted to.

2. It’s cheap! Compare Spam to other types of meat. You’ll find that buying and consuming Spam is very cost-effective. I buy Spam at Sam’s Club, where I get a six-pack of 12-ounce cans of Spam for a little over $13, I think. As with most things, it’s cheaper to buy Spam in bulk.

3. It’s long-lasting! I just looked on the bottom of one my cans of Spam, which I bought maybe about a month ago, and the expiration date is December 2011. Woo-hoo! Oh but wait! It’s not even an expiration date; the bottom of the can says, “Best By Dec 2011” which means that it will still be good for a long time after 2011. I’d bet that by 2013 it would be classified as “pretty good” and by 2015 it might be classified as “it won’t hurt you if you eat it.” Hooray!

4. Hawaiians dig it! And we all know how cool Hawaiians are. There are surfers and hula dancers and coconuts there! I have a friend who spent a lot of time in Hawaii, and he said that tons of the “beach bums” are happy if they have their Spam.

5. It’s canned! Spam come in nice-sized, attractive-looking cans. It’s like it’s already rationed out for you. If you buy a big ham and put it in the fridge, it’s likely to go bad before you eat it all. But with the cans, you just open a new can whenever you’re ready. And I must say that the cans stack nicely, so they fit into nicely into nooks. (They’re too big for crannies, though. :)

6. It’s solid! Spam comes in a nice solid chunk, (I just measured my can of Spam and it’s 2 inches wide, 4 inches long, and 3 inches tall.) So you can slice it or dice it or cube it or whatever. Spam also has a smooth consistency, unlike real meat, which has more uh… natural muscle variations, I guess.

There’s a lot of other cool things about Spam, but I do have small problem with the stuff. Well, it’s not the stuff itself that I have a problem with, exactly. To be more precise, I have a problem with the culture surrounding Spam.

For starters, the food name sounds silly. I can’t mention the word “Spam” to people without coming off sounding like a nerdy Monty Python fan or a pop-culture geekazoid, you know what I mean? For some reason, Spam’s gotten to be nerdy-hip, like Weezer. And people trying to be cool wear Spam T-shirts or otherwise display Spam-related merchandise. Just go the official Spam website, http://www.spam.com/ and you’ll see what I mean about the campy cheesy pop-culture mythology hip-to-be-square stuff surrounding Spam.

When I see people with wearing Spam T-shirts, it reminds me of how I felt back in high school when the cool crowd started wearing superhero T-shirts. It was frustrating. The cool kids who really didn’t read the Punisher or the Fantastic Four or Captain America bought the comic-book inspired T-shirts from Hot Topic or some other trendy mall store. I remember feeling like “I should be the one to wear those T-shirts! I’m really the one who reads those comic books. I’m the true fan!”

And now, I feel like I am a true Spam fan. I actually buy and eat the stuff. But the people wearing the T-shirts and singing the Monty-Python Spam song are usually not true Spam proponents.

I know there are other people out there like me, who truly enjoy Spam for what it is, and not for what it has been mythologized and marketed to be. And I know there are other people out there like me, who respect Spam for its original purposes, for its noble yet down-to earth aims.

Where are you, Spam purists? What are your names? Put them down here, in my book.

I am calling for the mobilization of a powerful body of Spam purists.

Who will join me?

Oh, and another problem with Spam- the actual product and not the mythology and pop-culture surrounding the product- is that some people are genuinely grossed out by it. I know my wife is. My wife and others think it’s not a natural meat or something. Yes, Spam is very processed and chock-full of preservatives, and yes, it was originally invented for the military, when the military needed canned meat that would last a long time on the battlefield or something like that. And yes, Spam is neither ham nor pork, but rather a weird hybrid of the two. I guess information like that can gross people out.

But I imagine that what they do to make Spam in factories is no worse than what they do to make TV dinners in factories. Both Spam and TV dinners have tons of fake chemical stuff in them.

Oh yeah, and hot dogs. Do you eat hot dogs? If you eat hot dogs, why won’t you eat Spam? That’s a very good question. Answer it.

I just looked at my second-to-last, unopened can of Spam, and I found these reassuring words: “U.S. inspected and passed by the Department of Agriculture.” And you know what my Daddy always said, “If it’s good enough for the Department of Agriculture, it’s good enough for me!”

Open up, I say. Open wide, and let the Spam-train choo-choo it’s way into Mouthy-Town!

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa