How a canned pork product became a global icon and a digital nuisance

Food & Drink · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Introduced in 1937 to move surplus pork shoulder, this canned meat became a wartime staple that fed millions of soldiers. Today, it is a culinary fixture in Hawaii and South Korea, a cultural touchstone for Monty Python, and the unlikely namesake for the unwanted emails flooding your inbox.

Created by Hormel Foods, Spam was designed to utilize pork shoulder, a cut that struggled to find a market. The name, coined by actor Ken Daigneau, was a portmanteau of spiced ham. While initially marketed as a lunch meat during the Great Depression, its true rise to global prominence occurred during World War II. The military required shelf-stable, easily transportable protein, and Spam became a ubiquitous part of the Allied diet. More than 100 million pounds were consumed by soldiers, and future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev later credited the product with sustaining the Russian army.

The product’s legacy is complex. While many soldiers grew weary of the repetitive menu, civilians in war-torn regions came to rely on it. This exposure embedded Spam into local diets across the Pacific, particularly in Hawaii, the Philippines, and South Korea. In Hawaii, it is so deeply integrated that it is often called 'Hawaiian Steak' and featured in dishes like Spam musubi—a snack combining the meat with rice and seaweed. By 2012, global sales reached eight billion cans, and by 2022, consumption rates were estimated at 13 cans per second.

Beyond the kitchen, Spam achieved a unique cultural status. The British comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus featured a famous sketch where the meat appeared in every dish on a menu, leading to the term 'spam' being adopted to describe the deluge of unsolicited, mass-targeted emails. This linguistic shift highlights how a humble, vacuum-sealed pork product transcended its origins to become a permanent fixture in both global foodways and the modern digital lexicon.

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