Spam and World War II

The U.S. armed forces quartermaster’s office had no reservations about the safety of the canned meat. Nutritious, filling, affordable, and shelf stable, Spam was a nearly perfect mess-tent food. Before the war was over, the army alone received 150 million pounds of pork luncheon meat. The result was a chorus of complaints, cartoons, poems, and jokes about Spam. In letters to Hormel and in the military newspapers Yank and Stars and Stripes, soldiers called the product “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meat loaf without basic training,” and “the real reason war was hell.” Some of the “Spam” served to soldiers was generic luncheon meat made to government specifications. But because it was the most famous brand before the war, Spam received all the blame. Spam even became part of the language of the war: Uncle Sam became “Uncle Spam,” the European invasion fleet was called the “Spam fleet,” and the United Service Organizations (USO) toured the “Spam circuit.”