This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show,

including your stories, send them to Our American Stories.com.

They're some of our favorites.

Dustin Black is a group creative director for an ad agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In 2007, he published The Book of Spam, a most glorious and definitive compendium

of the world's favorite canned meat. He was a collaboration with his advertising partner

at the time, Dan Armstrong, when they worked for Hormel as advertisers. Shortly after the book

was published, it was internationally recognized and distributed.

Here is Dustin Black with the story of spam.

Right off the bat, it was a lot of interesting.

You'd be going to work and you'd pull over and call a Korean radio show or something like that to talk about it.

You know, what's great about spam, and I think why I'd have the appeal is it's got that,

it's been around forever, and everybody has a story about it.

Like, 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, 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, heritage.

I mean, Spam is fascinating, and I think that what Hormel maybe doesn't even get as much

credit for as they should is sort of revolutionizing the meat

process or the meat packing process. Spam itself is a result of, you know, 100 years of technology

of trying to preserve meat to get it shelf stable for longer periods of time. And strangely enough,

...