SPAM: Culinary Tradition or Colonial Mentality?

By: Elaine Lehman

 

As a kid of immigrants, I have always been interested in learning about origins. I grew up asking about a lot of questions and exploring traditions of diverse cultures. Always in search of connections.

I’ve continued this practice here at Rizal Center. We talk a lot about food, how dishes are prepared in different regions in the Philippines, as a way to find connections. This past March, our discussion became lively when it turned to corned beef. I was surprised that some of our community members had never tasted it, except from a can. And that there was a strong affection for SPAM.

I was intrigued. My family did not eat SPAM. I was first introduced to it while in Hawai’I, in the form of musubi, a Hawaiian version of onigiri that binds a cooked slab of SPAM to rice with a piece of nori. For me, it was a guilty pleasure short-lived. Like many, I was drawn in by the saltiness, the spices, and easy access. But associations of processed meat with diabetes, cardiopulmonary disease, and obesity overrode momentary indulgence.

In spite of these health concerns, many find SPAM enjoyable and will defend its consumption as an enactment of Filipino identity. I was curious why our people who subsist on vegetables, fruits, fi sh, coconuts eat imported processed foods that are high in sugar, salt, fat, sodium nitrate, artificial color.

SPAM, a Depression-era creation, was launched by Hormel Foods Corporation in 1937. The product was intended to increase the sale of pork shoulder which was not a very popular cut. Its recipe, using pork shoulder (once considered an undesirable byproduct of hog butchery), water, salt, sugar, and sodium nitrate (for coloring) remained unchanged until 2009, when Hormel began adding potato starch to sop up the infamous gelatin “layer” that naturally forms when meat is cooked – an aesthetic choice.

Viewed in disdain by many in the U.S. and U.K., the budget-friendly meat product has enjoyed a recent upswing on the American mainland in part thanks to rising meat costs and a floundering economy. When the recession hit in early 2008, SPAM saw its sales jump 10 percent compared to the previous year.

SPAM did not make its global mark until the U.S. entered World War II and the meat product made its way to Hawai’i and England, Russia, and the countries of the Asian Pacific, where fondness for the product has remained strong. At the end of the first quarter of 2019, Hormel reported that export of SPAM led double-digit growth in profit increases.

But SPAM fervor was not always present in Hawai’i. According to food historian Rachel Laudan, who spent years living in Hawaii and wrote a book called The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage in 1996, In Hawai’I SPAM’s proliferance happened less due to the presence of American G.I.s and more to the government restrictions unfairly placed on the local population. “Unlike the mainland, they couldn’t intern all the Japanese [in Hawaii], The economy would have collapsed.”

Instead, the United States placed sanctions on Hawaiian residents, restricting the deep-sea fishing industries that were mainly run by Japanese Americans. Because islanders were no longer allowed to fish, Laudan says, ‘one of the important sources of protein for the islands vanished.’ Spam — along with other canned luncheon meats and sardines — took its place.

Donald M. Shugg of the University of Hawaii explains it this way in his 2001 paper on the fishing industry in the Hawaiian Journal of History:

“Growing tensions between the United States and Japan during the 1930s led the United States military to view Hawai’i’s fishing fleet as a serious threat to national security. For example, when the Japanese government arranged for many of Hawai’i’s Japanese fishermen to attend fishing schools in Japan, there were concerns that the fishermen were being interrogated by Japanese Navy officials on hydrographic conditions in Hawai’i. In 1940, suspicions about the loyalty of Japanese immigrants resulted in implementation of a federal statute that prohibited fishing vessels of five tons or more from obtaining licenses unless the vessel owner was a U.S. citizen. The next year, the Territory passed a law prohibiting aliens from fishing with hukilau, gill, or purse seine nets within one mile of shore in order to preserve 123 fishery resources for native Hawaiians and other U.S. citizens. This legislation abruptly ended the careers of many fishermen in Hawai’i.”

Simultaneously across the Pacific, residents of Guam, Saipan, Micronesia, Korea and Japan “were on the point of starvation”. The cans of SPAM coming in were welcomed in those terrible situations at the end of World War II.

Over time, Americans, particularly G.I.s, associated canned meat with hardship, poverty, and unrefinement. For the Philippines, it was an imported product, giving it prestige. Coupled with rice, SPAM become a popular addition to the Filipino breakfast, along with tapsilog (sweet beef, fried garlic rice and egg), tosilog (sweet, cured pork), sinangag, and itlog. Now, it’s known as spamsilog.

Today, it’s an open question whether SPAM can still be considered a value, given its harmful health effects as a processed meat and the wide availability of what would seem like superior products. Some say the Filipino/FilAm is fond of SPAM because of comestible nostalgia. Others have described it as a symptom of colonial mentality – the acceptance of foreign culture due to the belief that the colonizers are more worthy and far more superior. What do you think? How does SPAM illuminate our culture and what does it symbolize in our community – here and in the Philippines?