One Minute History - The Story of SPAM
3It’s ham, it’s canned, it’s sort of edible, and it made a massive contribution to World War Two: this is the story of SPAM. SPAM was introduced in 1937 by Hormel, an American food processing company that was looking for a way to sell more pork shoulder. Their solution involved processing and precooking the pork shoulder with ham, then canning it with lots of salt and preservatives – giving it a long shelf life that made it perfect to feed US troops when World War 2 broke out a few years later. The US bought 150 million pounds of SPAM for its troops and also distributed it to America’s allies, most notably the Soviet Union, where Nikita Kruschev would later write that “without SPAM, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.” When the Pacific War ended, American GIs often traded their SPAM with the inhabitants of Japan and its former empire, sparking a strong appreciation for SPAM in Asia and the Pacific that continues to this day.
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