23 SPAM® Cans Tall

On the Life and Possible Death of "The Can"

Illustration by Sara Williams

For reasons I can’t understand, I’d really like to take a picture of my love standing next to the biggest can of SPAM® that I’ve ever seen, but it’s kept under lock and key behind a gate and a fence adorned with three rows of barbed wire. 

The can stands about five feet tall, and its lid is partially opened, pulled open by some large industrial and much hungrier than human hand. The can promises that what is inside is “Crazy Tasty”, and why shouldn’t it be? The can sits on the grass near the entrance and employee parking lot of the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, showcasing to all who enter or drive by what is being made incessantly inside this sprawling complex of metal and meat. Surely this, if it were actually filled with five full feet of SPAM®, would be the freshest, no?

As the plant is not open to outside tours, it’s clear that Hormel is keen to stick to that old aphorism about how the sausage, or rather how the SPAM®, gets made. What we know is that somewhere in there resides a six-story high hydrostatic SPAM® cooker, spitting out SPAM® at the rate of seven cans per second. This is a fact I will learn later today, after I’ve tried my first ever bite of SPAM®, a SPAM®-ple impaled onto a single pretzel stick and supplied too early in the tour to provide the appropriate narrative conclusion that I’d hoped an essay about this substance would naturally provide. I could have lied and made the final part of the essay up entirely, constructed a scene where I ripped the lid off of one of the eight cans of SPAM® we bought at the gift shop and carved thick slices out of the gelatinous blob to be fried in the cast iron, hot and sizzling. But I didn’t. I promise.

Let’s just face the question here: why now, amidst a steady stream of ecological disasters, ever-increasing war activities abroad, and weekly half-mast events here at home, is it necessary to write about SPAM®? Selfish reasons, mostly: willful distraction against oblivion disguised as legitimate inquiry. Also, I’ve always felt pulled to the SPAM® Museum once I’d learned of its existence, if for no reason other than the goofball one of wanting to wander somberly through a canned meat museum. Also, admittance is free.    

Maybe, too, we are entering an endpoint in this SPAM® story that we all share. While we’re still familiar with the can for now, go ahead and ask yourself honestly the last time you heard the word spam and actually thought about SPAM®? No, the word, perhaps now one of the most common words in the English language, has come to encapsulate each of the myriad forms of spam that endlessly assault both our digital and human faculties. I’m talking about extended vehicle warranty voicemails and account suspension text messages here, those faulty digital dragnets that rarely wind up in the faulty little folder in your email that only ever seems to intercept those few emails you might actually need.

What I’m saying is that spam is alive and growing, and that with it, SPAM® is subsequently dying. Or I’m saying that the SPAM® Museum is trying its best to keep SPAM® alive by presenting a perfect combination of pure capitalist kitsch and a dressed up version of SPAM®’s complicated history. But thinking about SPAM® in any small way means thinking about SPAM® and its role as a global cultural force, a forever food, and a faultless symbol of the evolution of American history over the last 100 years more than any other single thing might hope to be. Just ask Ted Genoways about it, whose Mother Jones long-form piece grew into an important book about the stuff specifically and the entire meatpacking industry. Or listen to The Atlantic’s “The Experiment” podcast, who spent three remarkable episodes on it and still didn’t get it all in. Pressure-cooked as it is, the subject of SPAM® always inevitably folds in upon itself and finds more to say. 

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Do you see that little figure up there? I tried to make a can of SPAM® with the symbols at my disposal, something to keep us both focused on SPAM® throughout this essay. “At first glance,” the SPAM® website says, “one might assume SPAM® products are produced through magic. But it’s actually a relatively simple, conventional process.” I will always want to believe that it’s magic, but from here on out, that poorly constructed little can up there will indicate the arrival of a SPAM® fact. They are strewn throughout the museum itself, questions printed on giant blue placards that visitors are encouraged to turn over to find out the answers. Each of these cans here represent a little bite of SPAM®, or maybe spam, for us both to consider.

Here’s one: 

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12.8 cans of SPAM® products are eaten every second.

If you arrive as the first visitors of the day at the SPAM® Museum, you should expect to be greeted warmly by a series of SPAM™bassadors. Politely decline their offer and take the tour self-guided only to be overwhelmed instantly by the sight and sound of towers of SPAM® cans with mounted informational touch screens. Witness a constantly rolling model train composed entirely of variously labeled SPAM® cans. Notice also the faint sound of a television on a tight three-and-a-half minute loop. Surely you can still recognize that sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the one that has gone on to spawn a Tony-award winning musical and changed the very definition of the word that this museum claims to celebrate. 

You know the skit. Graham Chapman as Mrs. Bun asks to hear the restaurant’s menu, of which most items contain SPAM® several times over. A chorus of Vikings a few tables over sing the sacred name over and over. Later, early computer programmers and internet message board users stole the bit, with users writing “Spam” over and over again to push other users’ content off of screens and quoting lines from the Python sketch to push users out of chat rooms. Now spam has come to mean many things, nearly all of them negative, just like SPAM® itself: a weird little sort of can Full o’ Void. 

I’m thinking a lot about the general reaction I witness at the mere mention of SPAM® these days, both to the can and, ironically, to the other kind. Mostly grimaces, groans, pantomime puking followed by some rite-of-passage story about an aunt or uncle serving the stuff to them out of spite or necessity. This is a somewhat unfair and dismissive deception of a product that has managed to remain on grocery store shelves for over eighty years. But despite Hormel’s best efforts to brand and rebrand SPAM® as a versatile and crowd-pleasing culinary addition to the average American consumer’s pantry, it remains a substance that usually elicits the one, resounding question: “What is that stuff?” 

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SPAM® is made of “Six Simple Ingredients”.

Water

Salt

Sugar

Potato Starch

Sodium Nitrate

Pork with Ham

Somehow, I still don’t believe it, that what I taste at the end of that pretzel stick at the SPAM® Museum is made only of these six things. My SPAM®-ple tastes mainly of salt, a little like ham, and seems to liquify instantly in my mouth. The museum devotes an entire “How It’s Made” wall to learn us of this fact. Reading it, I have to imagine, is like sitting through a timeshare presentation or a multi-level marketing scheme, as if by trying to reveal the answer, Hormel has somehow further clouded the truth. (For further fictional speculation on the makings of SPAM®, I encourage reading the haiku kept at the SPAM®-ku Archive.) The faux chalkboard wall says the meat comes from “Two cuts from the same piggy”: pork shoulder and ham. (I can’t help but note also that the arrow meant to indicate where the “Ham” comes from points directly beneath the salmon pink pig’s curly tail.) We know what the water, salt, and sugar do, so just let’s all agree that the potato starch “helps keep moisture inside the meat, where it belongs,” and the sodium nitrate “helps preserve the pink color of the meats.” 

That’s all SPAM® is. 

And yet, somehow, you don’t believe it either.

Do you?  

My SPAM™bassador, that uniformed specter who provided me with my first SPAM®-ple within seconds of entering the museum then disappeared, finds me next at the Make-Your-Own Can of SPAM® exhibit. (Be sure and avail yourself first of the provided protection gear, an anachronistic luxury that, as Ted Genoways first pointed out, many of the actual workers that work in the Hormel plant down the road have only begun enjoying in the last few years.) I’m listlessly placing a pink bean bag that represents the SPAM® into a label-less can when my SPAM™bassador says, “The record is one can in seven seconds, which is cool because at the plant, they make seven cans in one second.” He never slows down his steps, his tray of SPAM®-ples gone cold on this quiet  Monday museum morning, disappearing into a door in the dark that the museum lights don’t reach.

I’m left holding the bean bag, trying to cram it into a can that will not change its shape, multiplication tables moving admittedly slower than they used to through my head. 

7. 14. 21. 28…

Meanwhile the SPAM® train keeps on chugging over my head. I never see an engine, or a caboose.

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The canjo is a banjo made using a SPAM® Brand can.

You can buy one for yourself from the SPAM® Shop for $64. 

None of us can truly be strangers to what the SPAM® Museum holds. Maybe like you, there’s a good chance that my love and I have met this pork before, out where it was raised. We’ve come to the SPAM® Museum from Iowa, the top pork producing state in these United States., a place where pigs outnumber the people something to the tune of 7:1, adding up to nearly 24 million pigs being raised across the state at any given time. One of our U.S. senators, Joni Ernst, (the one who hasn’t been in state and federal office for over six decades and whose birth predates the advent of the color television,) even ran a campaign ad vowing to “make D.C. squeal.” I remember that I did not ask for that specifically and voted accordingly. But, sadly, it has turned out that the pigs have had more political sway than the electorate. 

In Iowa, as elsewhere, we’ve deferred to the interests of those who raise pigs and sell their excrement more than the people who eat them and drink the water here. You see, Iowa has a bit of water quality problem here. And maybe, wherever you are reading this, you do too. With every glass of water we drink, we seem to be getting to know the pig a little better. The incomparable Art Cullen, fellow Iowan and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor of The Storm Lake Times, has been writing about Iowa’s relationship with the business of pigs for decades. I defer to him on most matters, but especially this one. 

All I know is that traveling for any length of time off of the interstate will provide you a wealth of confinements to consider. Their familiar odor will both greet you and propel you on down the road at your own chosen speed. It smells distinctly like money, and therefore, like supreme political power. You understand as well as I do the confinements necessity in the modern economic and agricultural world, being the main providers of fertilizer and employment for many rural communities across this state and further, and food products far beyond it. Sara and I both once made summer money in confinements a couple of times, her here in Iowa and me over in Illinois, neither of us able to forget it. 

Now, with each confinement that passes, the harder it is to not see each oblong building as a SPAM® can writ large across the sparse Iowa landscape. 

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SPAM® products are sold in 48 different countries around the world.

SPAM® first started rolling out of Hormel’s meat processing plant in 1937, just in time to feed Depression-hungry Americans and also prepare them for the upcoming wartime meals. There is a not-so subtle message through the placement of the exhibits at the SPAM® Museum, one that traces the story of SPAM®’s national and global expansion over the next few decades directly along with the deployment of American military forces. In an exhibit featuring a parked full-scale army jeep and an activity that encourages visitors to lift their own ration boxes, there’s a letter that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote to a retired Hormel executive saying: 

During World War II, of course, 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-in-Chief, I believe I can still officially forgive you your only sin: sending us so much of it.

(An additional note from the museum is quick to state that “Unfortunately the government ordered as much generic luncheon meat during WWII as authentic SPAM® products, and the good old SPAM® brand was confused for its lesser likenesses.) 

I do not envy the marketing department that had the task of selling SPAM® to returning G.I.s and their families who had faced down the stuff for several years and still managed to eat it. No wonder they introduced the Hormel Girls, an all-female, military-style band created to promote Hormel products. They went on to march and perform across the country and have their own radio show: Music with the Hormel Girls. Eventually, after the Hormel Girls retired and SPAM® settled into its role as an affordable protein and a societal status symbol which roughly equates to this: The “Haves” did not eat SPAM®, and the “Have Nots” did. Still do, apart from those restaurants attempting to create dishes to ironically make SPAM® either cool or relevant.

Beyond the U.S., as the “World Market” exhibit conveys, it’s obvious that SPAM® is one of America’s most enduring cultural exports. In this section it also becomes clear that the SPAM® Museum is obsessed with presenting the SPAM® can as a tactile unit of measurement. 

Almost every section has a cartographical fact like “The Great Wall of China is 92,933,068 SPAM® cans long.” By equating the package itself with the product that it stores and using it to measure distances, the SPAM® Museum seems just as guilty of spamming their own story with raw arbitrary numbers that make one imagine the Great Wall composed entirely of millions and millions of SPAM® cans.  

I, for example, am around 23 SPAM® cans tall.

The SPAM® facts come quickly here at the “World Market” and tell branching stories of wartime and American capitalist endeavors, often side-by-side. Every year, the United Kingdom celebrates SPAM® Appreciation Week to commemorate SPAM®’s role in World War II. SPAM® was also introduced in the Philippines during the same war, and has since become a symbol of Filipino food culture and identity. At the exhibit celebrating SPAM® in Japan, a slightly unnerving commercial plays endlessly showing a person in a blue SPAM® mascot suit being hailed as a “superhero of the supermarket.” SPAM® was first introduced in South Korea during the Korean War. Now, only the U.S. consumes more SPAM® than South Korea, mainly thanks to the work of Hawaii, which consumes over eight million cans of SPAM® a year. It’s home to the annual SPAM® Jam Festival, and the McDonald’s there have it on the menu.

Most of the SPAM® consumed in those other countries is now made inside of those countries or nearby, and include regionally exclusive flavors, giving SPAM® a new chapter outside of its rigid American origins. And yet, I imagine you would be hard pressed to chomp down into a bite of SPAM® anywhere in the world and not imagine biting into a bullet. 

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The SPAM® Train is 780 cans long!

When you start finishing up your tour of the SPAM® Museum and work your way towards the gift shop, you should spam yourself some of the hundreds of SPAM® recipes that they have collected from around the world. All you have to do is simply supply the SPAM® Museum with your email address, a real form of digital soul-eating that I couldn’t imagine surviving, and so didn’t.  

The gift shop is mainly filled with endless options of SPAM® apparel and accessories. Other favorites include a SPAM® Brand Themed Yahtzee® Brand Game, a stuffed animal pig called Tubbie Pig wearing a SPAM® brand scarf, and SPAM® Brand Fishing Bobber. We wind up buying too many cans of  SPAM®, flavors we’ve not seen out in the wild, including SPAM® with Tocino Seasoning, SPAM® Hot and Spicy, and SPAM® Teriyaki. At one point, the woman working at the gift shop told us what the next new SPAM® flavors Hormel was going to release, but to be honest, I had forgotten them by the time we hit the exit. There, a pair of smiling SPAM™bassadors were waiting with plastic leis behind their backs. Sara and I both got the treatment, waiting for one of them to say that dreaded joke about getting lei'd, but neither did. Each lei had a package of SPAM® Singles hanging from it like coarse and shiny meat medals. Or medallions.

I guess Sara’d told them that I was doing a story about the SPAM® Museum and so they cranked up the charm, then handed us a reusable bag full of Hormel products, strangely none of which were SPAM®. Rather there were little packages of Skippy® peanut butter, a jar of Herdez® guacamole salsa, and a bag of Chi-Chi's® tortilla chips. I should have paid more attention to the exhibit entitled “Hormel Foods Today.” It was right next to the SPAM® Catapult, a can launcher it felt criminal to keep locked away behind glass. 

Amidst all of this SPAM® ephemera, it’s almost easy to forget that Hormel is a global company consisting of over 45 brands, and that since 2001, Hormel has acquired the Jennie-O®, Applegate®, Justin’s®, Skippy®, and Columbus® brands. The last few years has also seen Hormel enter into the world of plant-based meats. Hormel now employs more than 20,000 people around the world, and operates more than 30 manufacturing facilities, most of which are located here across the Midwest. Much of the “Hormel Foods Today” information feels widely out of place in the SPAM® Museum, bits of information better suited for a shareholder’s meeting. One board reads: “Diversification of Raw Material Inputs Reduces Earnings Volatility,” which sounds, at face value, inarguable. A touch screen nearby features some of the many company logos that Hormel owns, and encourages visitors to “Explore Our Brands.” It is striking to see what riches SPAM® has wrought, while nowhere in the museum is evidence of the famous year-long Hormel strike that many point to as the real and true end of organized labor in the U.S. 

Austin is and always will be a company town, for all the good and bad that designation brings. All of its restaurants have SPAM® on the menu somewhere, and all of the SPAM™bassadors at the museum have direct ties to the Hormel plant down the road. They are quick to point out the scholarships that the company has provided local students, and how the plant has kept the town alive when countless other Minnesota/Midwestern towns have dried up. Still, it is hard not to look at this wall of international brands and wonder if it would exist at all, and how different organized labor in the region might have looked, even SPAM® itself, if the strike had been successful. 

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Over 9 billion cans of SPAM® products have been sold. 

We’d learned from the woman at the gift shop that the local Culver’s served SPAM®, and so we were ordering at the counter within the hour, a SPAM® BLT to split, and two root beers for the road. When I called my mom from the car, proud to tell her that there was still hope for the world, that there is a Culver’s out there that serves SPAM® sandwiches, she says that I haven’t done it right.

She says that the only way to eat SPAM® is fried and served on white toast with yellow mustard. She’s told me that before, and will tell me it again later when I finally bring her and my father all of these cans of SPAM® as Easter presents. 

A few weeks after the SPAM® Museum, Sara says she’s hit the jackpot and found a trove of ancient SPAM® cans buried in the dump that the county has since turned into a Wildlife Area. It used to be that any decent ravine between two hills could be turned into a dump easily. It just took the trash enough to fill it. Naturally we had to dig in the dump until dusk when we were sure that we’d found them all, at least three iterations of SPAM® labels represented in our findings, along with several mother-of-pearl buttons and their corresponding mussel shells, and ancient cans of near beer, empty all. I even found a few stray pull-top lids that had been removed from their SPAM® cans, a real archaeological motherload I imagine is rare, having no evidence to support that. One can features a recipe for something I’m proud to report is called “Corn Patch Casserole.”

I’m looking at the cans now, empty time capsules that they are, these decades-old SPAM® vessels with the exact same ingredient list as the bright cans coming out of the pressure cooker in Austin, Minnesota this very moment. The only thing different is their lids. Some rip off at the side, leaving what appears to be a can that someone took a bite out of. Others tear off at the bottom, or at the top, far enough down the label to cut the word SPAM® clean in half. 

I can’t imagine that design lasted long.

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It would take 415,549,599 SPAM® brand cans to circle the circumference of the Earth.

I wish I could have made this last part up, but I didn’t.

After Easter dinner, my mother says “Weren’t you going to write something about SPAM®?”

I’d spent the whole drive down to Easter thinking about SPAM®, and thought I could take the drive home off. We stopped at a gas station outside of Canton, Missouri, where inside I watched a man steal a pair of sunglasses and drive away. No one cared. 

Back at my pump outside, I swear that I watched the gallons slowly turn above a SPAM® sticker, the kind you only get from going to the SPAM® Museum. Sara currently had one over the front-facing camera on her phone. Somebody had scraped most of the “S” off, so it kind of just said “PAM” but there it was: SPAM® had followed us all the way from Austin, Minnesota right here to what Sara calls “BF Missouri.” 

From the passenger seat Sara says “Isn’t it nice to be reminded once in a while that you are on the right path?” And there I was, just thinking about how many cans of SPAM® could fit between here and there.