Processed foods have a long list of successes and failures, but few have reached the level of SPAM. Loved, hated, ignored, and turned into a culinary delight alike, SPAM managed to adapt to eras, regions, and cultural clashes. But where does it come from? What is its origin? And most importantly: why do we use its name to identify unsolicited email and calls? Today we'll try to answer all that.
The Origin of SPAM
The original version of Hormel Spiced Ham, 1936. (Anon a mouse Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hormel Foods Corporation was founded in Austin, Minnesota, under the name "George A. Hormel & Company". Originally focused on processing and selling various meat products, the company launched its Hormel Flavor-Sealed Ham in 1926, the first canned ham product in the United States. Two years later it added canned chicken to its lines, but it wasn't until 1936 that "Hormel Spiced Ham" appeared, as an attempt to revalue pork shoulder, which wasn't very popular. On July 5, 1937, its name was shortened to SPAM, although there's no definitive agreement on its meaning: for some it's "SPiced hAM", and for others, "Shoulder of Pork And haM".
World War II
The logistical difficulties of sending fresh food to soldiers on the front turned SPAM into a wildcard for feeding all allied troops, including British and Soviet soldiers (through the Lend-Lease Act of 1941). In fact, Nikita Khrushchev himself acknowledged that thanks to SPAM they were able to provide sustenance to their army (they had lost all their fertile lands during the Nazi invasion).
The United States government ended up buying 65% of Hormel's production, and the company claims to have shipped more than 100 million pounds of SPAM (over 45,000 tons) during the war. As expected, many soldiers ended up hating the canned product: "Meatball without training" and "Ham that didn't pass the physical" are just two of the milder expressions used to describe SPAM. Hormel received a significant amount of "hate mail", and some soldiers decided to ban it from their homes.
Cultural Change
With the end of the war, the occupation process began, and SPAM managed to enter the regional diets of places like Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines. In fact, it was the only option for a large number of prisoners liberated from Japanese camps, their families, and the first post-war generation. Only in Hawaii are about 7 million cans consumed per year. Its presence is so widespread that fast-food restaurants like McDonald's and Wendy's ended up adding SPAM to their local menus, and it's usually served with eggs and rice.
SPAM + Unsolicited Email = Monty Python?
The relationship might seem strange on the surface, but it makes a lot of sense: while some regions incorporated SPAM (to the point of having holidays), others left a negative mark, with the UK at the forefront. This 'relationship' reached a new point thanks to Monty Python's 'Spam' sketch, originally aired on December 15, 1970. The word 'Spam' is repeated dozens of times, symbolizing a combination of abundance, insistence, and rejection at the same time.
Nobody knows for sure when the first association between the word SPAM and unwanted online messages was made, but Brad Templeton (the creator of the first '.com' company on the Web) points to March 31, 1993: a day earlier, Richard Depew's ARMM software (Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation) suffered a bug and ended up flooding the news.admin.policy newsgroup with 200 messages. Joel Furr was the one who used the word spam to describe the 'event', but I recommend checking out the original thread, because it's not to be missed.
Sources
Sources: Wikipedia, LIFE via Google Books, Time, Britannica, Hormel
