At dinner the other night, we were talking about e-mail spam, and my 15-year-old French stepson asked about the origin of “spam.” He is heavily into etymology, which I relate to totally.
I told him what I knew about it being a staple in WWII and said that the only place in the US where it still gets any respect (that I know of) today is, oddly enough, Hawaii, where they make musubi (sushi rice molded into shapes) with a little slab of SPAM on top and wrap it with nori. They sell ‘em in 7/11 stores the way they do hot dogs on the mainland. In Hawaii, you can get SPAM in restaurants with your scrambled eggs and stuff too. How do I know this? I lived there from the age of 15 to 20, and it hadn’t changed when I went back for a vacation three years ago.
It actually looks pretty tasty, doesn’t it? It is. But I didn’t have any when I was there last. I haven’t eaten red meat in 26 years.
(When I was a kid, though, my mom used to send us to school with sandwiches made with SPAM spread. Sounds disgusting now, but I loved the stuff.)
While poking around for pictures for this post, I found this article full of SPAM historical trivia on the Hormel website. SPAM also has its own website, which is worth a visit to for its monumental kitsch value alone.
Not surprisingly, there’s a SPAM merchandise site too. (This is America we’re talking about.) In fact, I am sorely tempted to get myself a SPAM t-shirt—because I’m a bit of a geekette, because it is one of the icons I grew up with and I’m slightly homesick at the moment, and because one of Vincent’s pet names for me is Spammy. One of his all-time favorite Monty Python skits is the SPAM skit, which he walks around reciting from time to time. (It’s very cute.)
Hormel undoubtedly owes a massive chunk of its SPAM merchandising revenues to the other kind of spam. I mean, I wouldn’t want a SPAM t-shirt if it weren’t for—spam. Wouldn’t it be nice if they forked over some of the buckage to help develop anti-spam technologies? Even though they didn’t ask for the notoriety, they’re still benefiting from the phenomenon…
I just wonder how many more times in my life I’ll have to read the words Vi*gra and h*rse sex? This kind of junk uses up valuable nanoseconds, and they add up…
So why am I going on about this subject today? I intended just to write a quick note to let you all know that I’ve had to install an aggressive comment spam blocker on this blog that doesn’t even show me the comments it flags as spam, which means that it’s entirely possible that a legitimate comment of yours might not get through. I allow all real comments through, even the mean ones, as long as they’re rational, so please don’t be offended if your comment doesn’t appear. And do let me know if that happens because, if it’s a problem, I will have to look for an alternative.
The reason I had to install this spam blocker is—this is how I understood Vincent’s explanation—the sites living on the free.fr servers are no longer allowed to talk to Akismet, Wordpress’s excellent spam blocker, because some assholes were abusing Port 80, and so everybody suffers. I didn’t understand the details. I’m not that much of a geekette! Vincent can tell you more.
Whoops, no longer having access to the Akismet Spam-blocker really sucks: it’s a life saver.
I’m not really sure if you can trust the alternative solution, since the link in your post (“an aggressive comment spam blocker”) goes to a “403 Forbidden” page.
But I can sympathize: my WP blog conveniently mentions “Akismet has protected your site from 179,003 spam comments” – I’d drown without it!
But not being able to check your spam-queue is indeed a drawback: you may miss authentic comments.
Hi Peter! Well, it let you through, so that’s good. Thanks for letting me know my link was messed up. I fixed it!
‘Spam’ was actually a bit of a nickname for me in high school – back when the word referred to the food.
Don’t you think it would be funny to serve it to Frenchies, as, say ‘our version of foie gras’?
I actually left a comment this morning that had no references to horse sized ‘members’, but rather on the subject of spam (potted meat) itself. Hmm… Am I being targeted as a spammer as well? (;
Hi Sassy.
After I wrote this, I was trying to recall if I’d seen the stuff in any of the American groceries here. There are two I go to (Thanksgiving in the Marais and The Real McCoys over by Ecole Militaire) or the Grande Epicerie du Bon Marché. One thing you can count on at all three of them is that they have the worst of the worst. That liquid marshmallow stuff in a jar from the 70s that people put on sundaes. Doritos. Pop Tarts. No wonder the frogs think we have no culinary taste. Cheerios for a whopping 10 Euros a box (evidently the formula is different for the French version). But they also have some staples, like popcorn and, for me refried beans…
Anyway, if they have Spam, I’m going to pick some up for Vincent’s kids. They’re major carnivores, they should like it!
Haha !
I had some friends from Bostonn that put that marshmellow stuff on their peanut butter sandwiches – they called them ‘fluff-n-nutters’. I can’t say I was ever tempted to taste one !
My husband (French) has a thing for Tang and Dr Pepper – whenever we go to the states or have visitors from there an obligotorty trip to Costco has to be made. I honestly let him enjoy his peché mignon but can’t say I partake in it !
I’ve heard of people doing the marshmallow fluff thing on peanut butter sandwiches, but I wouldn’t eat it either…
I do miss Dr. Pepper from time to time, but I always come away from the American groceries with a root beer or two. Tang? Half the French pharmaceuticals come in orange-flavored powder form or effervescent tablets, as you know! The vitamins too. I would think it would taste like medicine to him!
I thought this was one of the most disgusting “food” items I have ever seen pictured or described. In fact I thought you must have made it up to try to elicit outrage from readers, rather in the way that I do with the religious or with climate change denialists. But no, it is, sadly, real, and no less than Barack Obama likes it (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/21/obamas-hawaiian-holiday-s_n_152742.html) in fact he adds fried egg, and I am not sure if that makes it more or less disgusting.
I have just realised that I was exaggerating slightly. I had, almost, erased from my memory the evening I was offered, in a Chinese restaurant, something like fried jellyfish. My memory of what happened next has been totally erased. I also once ate, while in a camp with some Aboriginal people in far outback Northern Territory, a piece of crocodile intestine. I ate that, out of politeness to my hosts (to have rejected it would have been a major breach of etiquette), only to suffer, for the next ten years or so, from a major intestinal upset which re-emerged every full moon (joke). So, is spam on rice, with or without fried egg, wrapped in seaweed worse than those two or better? I can’t decide.
Hi David.
Barack Obama undoubtedly likes it because he grew up with it in Hawaii! (And I did say the SPAM musubis are good!) SPAM is not as disgusting as scrapple and people mix that up in scrambled eggs (never tried it, never would).
I have eaten octopus and snails. Never had jellyfish (though Vincent has, in a Chinese restaurant, and he said it was good). Definitely never had crocodile intestine. Vincent is an adventurous eater–he doesn’t seek it out but will try anything once. Not me!