CONSTELLATIONS // Spam: Canned Food, Culture, and Conflict
EXCERPT //
“I grew up in L.A., where one found Spam all over menus and home kitchens. I assumed every American household had a can in their pantry, along with Jiffy corn muffin mix and Little Debbie fudge brownies.
After receiving lukewarm enthusiasm from friends about my love for Vienna sausages (for my quarantine birthday, I had a digital cocktail weenie hour, where a half dozen of us wore hats and drank drinks, and they got to watch me open, ‘cook,’ and eat my festive snack of choice—what they considered mystery meat), I started to wonder—could my beloved canned meats be an Asian thing? A West Coast thing? I surveyed Asian friends in Philly, hapa (multiracial Asian Americans, ‘half’ or ‘part’ in Hawaiian) friends on both coasts, and my cousins. Spam was its own food group, or a part of their parents’ upbringing. I surveyed about 40 non-Asian friends in Philly. Most had never tasted Spam before, and the two who had tied their memories to hardship. ‘We had Spam because it was cheap [and] came in the government food boxes we got—canned meat, processed cheese, and dry milk is what I remember best. Government food that got passed out to the poor.’ And stigma. ‘In the South it was more of a poor meal...and we were poor.’
This was curious for me. Asians don’t have a negative class affiliation with Spam. We don’t have a class affiliation with Spam at all.”
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