Spamarama

Just a silly thing...

Sometimes it’s good to talk about something that’s true, but faintly ridiculous. We had a good chuckle this evening about one such thing: Spam.

No, I am not talking about the highly dubious emails that appear in your inbox (I got an email from the one and only Warren Buffett the other day! He was offering me two million U.S. Dollars! Sadly, I deleted his kind message).

I am talking about the Spam (with an upper case “S”) that you eat, and which both of us remember from our post-war childhoods in the UK. It was actually produced by an American company, in a tin. We used to have Spam sandwiches, and sometimes Spam fritters! It was not exactly health food, but I guess it was “cheap and cheerful.” When I looked it up I found that it was/is high in sodium and also high in saturated fat. Horrors! And it tasted OK, but not that great, come to think of it. It is made of pork shoulder and ham.

Reading further on Wikipedia, I discovered that there was once a festival devoted to spam in Austin, Minnesota, in the U.S., called “Spamarama.” It “reached its peak,” says Wiki, in 1998, with thousands of attendees, but has since gone dormant. Rather a shame. I will have to look for some video of the Spam eating contest, the Spam toss competition, and of course the cook-off (which included recipes for Spam ice cream and “GuacaSPAMole.” There’s even a vocal quartet called the Spamettes!

One of the attractions in Austin, Minnesota is - yes, you’ve guessed it - the Spam Museum.

Oh, and can you believe this? Residents of Hawaii consume no less than seven million cans of Spam annually. And did you know that there are ten different varieties of Spam in the Philippines, where it is a cultural symbol? Filipinos embrace it, whereas nowadays I suspect many countries regard it as cheap, inferior, unfashionable.

So Spam, it seems, is still enjoying a certain amount of popularity globally. And perhaps a little cult appeal. One of the best-known sketches on Monty Python’s Flying Circus celebrates the joys of Spam, with a rousing chorus sung by Vikings in a working-class café (“Beans are off!”) Of course, being Monty Python, it is quite remarkably silly.

In this grim world of shootings and military drones, I am happy to think about things like Spam.