It's Time To Stop Worrying And Give Spam A Chance

Look, we understand just as much as anyone else that Spam, that notorious canned ham product, isn't everyone's cup of tea. It's canned meat, for one, and it's been quite a while since that was a novel way to keep food fresh. Two, it's not exactly healthy. But at the end of the day, if you eat hot dogs or salami, you have no reason to not eat Spam; it's basically the same exact thing.

Take a look at the ingredients list for Spam and you won't see anything too crazy: pork, salt, water, modified potato starch, sugar, and nitrites (the curing salt that makes bacon and hot dogs pink). Spam has a reputation for being "mystery meat," but it's actually anything but. Compare that to the ingredients list of, say, Ball Park brand franks, which contain mechanically separated chicken, potassium lactate, sodium diacetate, and sodium erythorbate, and Spam looks downright natural.

Once you're ready to take the plunge, there are a ton of Spam recipes out there to experiment with. The first thing you should do, though, is cut off a slice, fry it up in a pan until its nicely browned and sizzling, and take a bite. It actually has a pretty mild, salty, ham-like flavor that's compatible with lots of other foods. Try it on a breakfast sandwich with an egg and cheese, dice it up and turn it into fried rice, stir some into mac and cheese, top a burger patty with it instead of bacon, add it to grilled cheese, bake it into biscuits, scramble it up with eggs... The possibilities are really endless. Your distaste for Spam is most likely just a fear of the unknown; We're not saying that it's something you should eat every day, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.