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Listen: I’ve made my peace with SPAM.
As a kid, I didn’t get it. Dreaded it, even. I was born in Eastern North Carolina, where slabs of salt-cured country ham were given to me like pacifiers before I had my first tooth. But processed pork, ground down and cooked in the very pull-tab cans in which it will be shipped to supermarkets? There was something darkly industrial, even dystopian about it—a shelf-stable staple food for when things have gone terribly wrong.
Could never get together with my dad on this. That’s what he loved about it.
He was born and raised in the Bronx of the 1960s and 70s, one of eight Puerto Rican siblings growing up in a cramped apartment where everything was scarce and shared. A mass-produced, eminently affordable source of calories and protein, formed into small square bombs of salt, sugar, and fat custom-made for a kid’s palate? Panza llena, corazón contento.
When he joined the Marine Corps and shipped out to Paris Island at 18, he would tell me, it was the first time he had a bed and pillow all his own. In the military, SPAM was almost a cultural tradition—American fighting men ate 150 million pounds of it during WWII. Sailors, soldiers, and Marines spread this quintessentially American gift all over the world—Guam, Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines. But it really took root and blossomed in Hawaii, where it was destined to join the cross-cultural streams that gave us plate lunch. Today, Hawaiians eat more SPAM than anyone anywhere, per capita—more than 7 million cans a year.
And, being Hawaiians, they don’t just eat—they innovate.
When the Sacramento Union sent a young newspaper correspondent to the Hawaiian islands in 1866, they were still a few decades from being taken by force, annexed by American business and government interests. But Christian missionaries were already at work trying to convert the native population.
“How sad it is,” Mark Twain wrote. “To think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell!”
It is with that sort of dark humor that Hawaii has weathered the many slings and arrows, literal and metaphorical, of being a place so incomparably beautiful, so rich in resources, so desirable in every way that nations and corporations the world over cannot resist trying to exploit and ruin it. But Hawaii endures. When fruit and sugar companies built vast plantations and shipped in laborers from China, Japan, the Philippines, and Portugal, islanders incorporated their foodways into their own. My wife and I were lucky enough to spend some time in Honolulu a few years back, and we fell in love with the whole melting pot—poi, loco moco, fried rice omelets, and yes, even SPAM musubi.
A fusion of Japanese rice balls called omusubi or onigiri, cheap and available SPAM and soy sauce, all wrapped in nori (seaweed). These sweet and salty little miracles shouldn’t work. But they do work—and work overtime.
These days, I’m lucky enough to be able to get my fix just down the street from my place, at Qinji Hawaiian BBQ & Ramen on Golden Gate Drive. Serious ramen people in my life love this spot, but I could go just for the SPAM musubi and Kalua pork.
Took my dad there the last time he was in town—my way of admitting he’d been right all along. Ordered the musubi and watched him smile, cut it open, discard the rice and seaweed, and savor that SPAM. Tasted like victory.