Spam: A Slice of Americana

Feb. 26 -- For the makers of Spam, it was déjà vu all over again as the millennium wound down.

Sales of the pink luncheon meat in the familiar blue rectangular can with yellow lettering spiked on worries about the breakdown of civilization.

The boom in Spam sales helped Hormel Foods Corp. to record earnings in fiscal 2000 and called to mind Spam's early days, circa the late 1930s and early 1940s, when rural Americans stocked up on pork in a tin that didn't need refrigeration and GIs fighting to liberate Europe encountered Spam in their rations, day after day after day.

But life in the new millennium proceeded pretty much as usual. What that meant is Spam sales returned to earth and Hormel's first-quarter earnings fell 5.3 percent from the year-earlier pace, dropping from $43.8 million to $41.5 million.

What would you do with Y2K surpluses of Spam?

Not that the people at Austin, Minn.-based Hormel are worried. Hormel has managed to appeal to a new generation of consumers by presenting Spam as a contemporary food while cultivating Spam's cultural niche as a campy icon.

The canned pork is the subject of thousands of poems, several Web sites, a handful of books and a classic skit by Monty Python's Flying Circus, the British comedy troupe.

‘This Enigmatic Porcine Muse’

John Nagamichi Cho, for instance, maintains the Spam Haiku Archive on the World Wide Web "so that anyone who comes under the influence of this enigmatic porcine muse can share his or her poetic epiphany with the rest of the world."

Cho, a researcher at MIT, doesn't eat Spam. But he likes its dual appeal as a venerable lunch loaf with a prominent historical role and as a slice of Americana that people love to mock as a relic of a polyester time gone by.

"People who write about Spam are two different breeds," Cho said. "Its built-in irony appeals to creative types who like to write poetry, [many of whom] have a nostalgic, love-hate memory of Spam.

"And there's a younger generation that views Spam as anachronistic — 'Who needs canned meat these days, anyway; there's too much salt and fat.' They view it with amusement that it's still around."