Welcome to the Back Porch… bit windy here on the plateau today but since moving here I can say it is the  only place I have lived for any time where the wind blows every day, that would be Amarillo Texas. Consider this…Spam, not the unsolicited electronic messages and such, not that, but the kind that comes in a can! The name being a combination  of “spice and ham”…thus Spam. Most folks  do not visualize the can thing. I always have a few cans of Spam in the pantry along with some cans of Vienna Sausages. Now about that Spam…Hormel Foods claims this phenom and with pride. What exactly is it? It is a blend of pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite (a preservative). It is not on your list of healthy foods… it contains twice as much of the daily dietary recommendation of fat as it does of protein, and what about the health effects of salt and preservatives. Why hasn’t it been kicked down the road? It showed up in 1937. Made its mark as an easily prepared food, lunch meat and such but could be found on many tables during the lean times of the depression. There are a lot of things about spam most of us don’t know and most would ask “who cares.”  After World War II, more than 100 million pounds of SPAM were consumed by Allied soldiers. Ponder on this…Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev credited SPAM with saving the Russian army during the war. By 1959 over one billion cans of the product had been sold a figure that climbed to eight billion by 2012, the last year for which Hormel published sales figures. One more little thing…can you believe the company opened a museum devoted to the meat product at its corporate headquarters in Austin, Minnesota, in 1991…well best you believe. Todays Ponder is very simple…Why is that?

Jk