SPAM, IT SEEMS, IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU

Do you remember the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith’s neighbour declares the nameless pink stuff that hardly pretends to be meat and is served with the slop in the Victory Canteen to be “double plusgood”? It’s not an easy admission that I feel much the same way about Spam. Spam is double plusgood. I confess it. I like Spam. Vikings sing about it. Probably an aberrant result of being raised in the ruins of Europe when dead Messerschmitts still rusted in the fields. For many years, my mother preserved a weird World War II cookbook called something like “Meals To Beat Hitler.” Sometimes I suspected she wrote it. It contained many Spam driven recipes. I’m actually happy to eat Spam cold, diced and with ketchup, but if cooking is involved, my favorite is the Spam fritter, a thick slice of Spam deep fried in batter. I have never been under any illusion, however, that Spam might actually be healthy. File along with cigarettes under deviant lethal pleasure. Brad Reed’s note on AlterNet was certainly no surprise….

“Spam was really a major miracle of food science, as it solved a mystery that humanity had been trying for centuries to figure out: namely, how to make meat-flavored Jell-O. Developed in the 1930s, Spam is derived primarily from pork shoulder meat (seriously) and combined with water, sugar, sodium nitrate (of course) and copious amounts of salt. The result is a meat-like goo that derives 80 percent of its calories from fat and that delivers a whopping 790 mg of sodium per two-ounce serving. Spam first hit the big-time during World War II when its highly preserved state made it the ideal food to feed to our protein-needy soldiers fighting over in Europe. Now there's a fine tribute to our fighting boys! Thanks for risking your butts against the Nazis, fellas, now here’s a mound of pork slime! When you think about it, it’s remarkable that more of our troops didn’t defect to the German army, which assuredly would have offered them generous helpings of bratwurst, knockwurst and schweineschnitzel in exchange for changing sides. The fact that Americans bravely suffered through Spam prior to fighting the Battle of the Bulge adds yet another heroic chapter to the Greatest Generation’s legacy.”

The secret word is Bypass