mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
For the benefit of all you cooking show fanatics out there — and I live with one, so I know you’re out there — this is my humble contribution to the genre; a one-word crash-course in modern Hawaiian cuisine: SPAM. Hawaiians, it seems, eat more of it than anyone else in the U.S., an average of 16 tins per person per year. It’s so popular, you can order it at McDonald’s in Hawaii and even get it in sushi form. Turns out American G.I.s imported the stuff as rations during WWII, and a state-wide craze was born – as well as a state-wide epidemic of heart disease, diabetes and strokes. A 2001 Department of Health study found that 71% of deaths of Hawaiians aged 25 and older were “nutrition-related.” But that doesn’t explain the Hawaiian’s atypical love of Spam, which is readily available in the rest of the U.S., but nowhere near as popular. Famous travel writer Paul Theroux has posited this theory:
“…the former cannibals of Oceania now feast on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. `Long pig’ as they called a cooked human being in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the people-eaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absence of Spam they settled for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor.”
Facing some criticism for his statement (apparently some people found it, uh, offensive) Theroux has since brushed it off as a joke. But it makes you wonder — how corpsy does it taste? (Lacking any basis for comparison, I will have to take his word for it. Unless some brave (and depraved) reader would like to share a deep dark secret with us …
Comments (2)
Comment
- Follow mental_floss
Who on the green earth knows why Hawaiians are so fond of it? I, however, do not see anything innately wrong with the product. I mean, it’s pretty much just smashed and formed meat, with fewer ingredients than regular bologna. And I love bologna. And being an anth student, I’ve heard that human flesh doesn’t taste so much like pork – that maybe the term “long-pig” just denoted our relative hairlessness. I think we’re more reddy-meat tasting, prolly like mutton.
posted by Amanda on 11-14-2006 at 12:35 pm
I’m born and raised in Hawaii and would like to offer the following recipe for Spam Musubi, which is how most of us here in the islands like our spam.
Slice and fry a can of spam in a mixture of brown sugar and shoyu (soy sauce). Using a musubi maker (don’t know where you get this on the mainland) put down a layer of rice, a slice of spam, and another layer of rice. Press it all together and wrap with a sheet of seaweed. Ono-licious!
PS: Paul Theroux wrote one of the worst books on Hawaii known to man. He’s a mainlander, what can he know? Check out Lee Tonouchi and Lois-Ann Yamanaka for some hilarious and informative REAL acconts of locals and their food.
posted by Rachel on 11-14-2006 at 2:42 pm