Spam Museum

We spent Monday night in Austin, Minnesota, which is apparently also known as Spam City. Hormel’s primary spam factory is located in Austin and so is the Spam Museum. The museum was free so we stopped by on the way out of town. I expected the museum to be pretty weird but it really went beyond any of my expectations.

We walked in to a ‘wall of spam’ made of more than 3,000 cans. A very friendly tour guide greeted us and walked us into a theater showing a short film about the history of spam. The theater was totally packed with a diverse crowd of people. It was difficult to tell who was there because they thought it was funny and who was there because they really loved spam. I had never tasted spam in my life, but as the movie went on, I became confused as to which group I belonged to.

Spam, (SPiced hAM) comes in more than 8 flavors and is sold all around the world. It is most popular in Hawaii, Australia, and South Korea. Tom Brokaw gave a speech at the museum’s opening ceremony thanking spam for its service to soldiers in World War 2. Not only has spam played a strange but prominent role in American history, but (this was very surprising to me) it is more popular than ever, with all US factories expanding and increasing spam production.

The museum was of course very “pro-spam,” but it still had a sense of humor about the stuff. There was an exhibit based on the Monty Python spam sketch and an exhibit demonstrating the life of a spam-worker. After 15 minutes or so in the museum I began to fall under the spell of spam. It’s meat that doesn’t spoil! It can be cooked in hundreds of ways! It’s a symbol of American ingenuity and productivity! What a wonderful product that had affected so many peoples’ lives for the better. Even the exhibit “What’s In It?” made me feel like this was a product I had really been missing out on. (The answer, according to the exhibit, was “Ham, Salt, Sugar, and… some other stuff!”)

As I headed out of the museum into the spam gift-shop, a woman in a spam apron approached me with a tray of spam-samples. “Would you like to try bacon-spam?” she asked. After an amazing museum experience and a newfound love of spam-culture, I couldn’t wait. “Of course!” Then I put something in my mouth that was perhaps a combination of bacon, salt, and wet sponge. The spam spell was lifted, and we got the heck out of there.