Spam: How a Canned Meat Became an American Icon
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, ask ten people what Spam is, and you will hear ten different answers. Some think of canned meat on a grocery shelf. Others think of World War II rations or Spam in Hawaii. A few still wonder what the word actually means.
Dustin Black, the author of The Book of Spam, explains where Spam came from, how it got its name, and why this canned meat outlasted countless food trends.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.1 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, |
| 0:18.1 | and we tell stories about everything here on this show, |
| 0:21.5 | including your stories, send them to OurAmerican Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to Our American Stories.com. There's some of our favorites. Dustin Black is a group |
| 0:28.6 | creative director for an ad agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2007, he published |
| 0:34.7 | The Book of Spam, a most glorious and definitive compendium of the world's favorite canned meat. |
| 0:41.7 | It was a collaboration with his advertising partner at the time Dan Armstrong when they worked for Hormel as advertisers. |
| 0:49.6 | Shortly after the book was published, it was internationally recognized and distributed. |
| 0:55.9 | Here is Dustin Black with the story of spam. You know, what's great about spam, and I think why I'd had the appeal is it's |
| 1:04.0 | got that, it's been around forever, and everybody has a story about it. Like, there's very, |
| 1:09.1 | there's nobody in the world that you can't sort of like spark up a conversation around spam. You know, any corner of the globe, it's, there's an experience with it. I was on production with Tim Gunn a couple years ago, and he and I bonded over spam stories growing up, because that was part of his, like, I mean it was spam is fascinating and I think that |
| 1:28.1 | what hormel maybe doesn't even get as much credit for as they should is sort of revolutionizing |
| 1:33.2 | the the meat process or the meat packing process uh spam itself is a result of uh you know 100 years |
| 1:42.0 | of technology of trying to preserve meat to get it shelf stable for |
| 1:47.0 | longer periods of time. And strangely enough, like Napoleon when he was moving his armies, |
| 1:51.7 | was really fascinated with how do I feed these armies through really cold Russian winters |
| 1:57.2 | and keep them fed and they're getting tired of salted and dried out food. |
| 2:01.3 | So he started playing around and some of his scientists, I guess you can call him, with |
| 2:05.3 | packing meat and glass jars and putting fat on top of it. And they would boil it for an hour. |
| 2:10.9 | And that boiling was basically an early version of pasteurization. And from there, it went to cans, |
| 2:18.9 | metal, thick metal cans. And it got to the point where the cans were larger and |
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