Happy Birthday, Spam! America's favorite canned meat turns 75 (+video)
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Spam’s tradition of loving self-deprecation continues, if sometimes reluctantly. In 2001, Hormel opened an expansive Spam musem at the Austin, Minn, manufacturing plant location, where, in addition to canning Spam in a mock assembly line and eating at an all-Spam restaurant, you can screen Monty Python sketches. Another big facet of Spam’s popularity is state fairs, many of which hold Spam recipe contests. The annual “Spamarama” held every April Fool’s Day in Austin, Texas, has a contest with the objective of coming up with a way to make Spam edible, and one suspects that’s the unspoken goal of many other such contests.
And Hormel doesn't always take the Spam bashing in stride. In 2006, the company threatened to sue a local Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands newspaper for articles decrying Spam, which has a very high salt content, as having adverse effects on the local population.
Still, if it continues selling at its current rate (122 million can per year, according to Hormel), Spam will roll out its 8 billionth can in two years or so. So while many of us may love Spam solely for its joke potential, many more love it honestly, and have for three quarters of a century.
