I can’t say that I grew up eating that much Spam.
In our house, it was a treat, something my mother would fry up when my father was out and serve — in the Filipino way — with rice.
My mother was an excellent cook and believed in fresh ingredients, but Spam was an exception.
Occasionally she would also roll out a can of creamed corn, adding milk and sugar to transform it into a kind of dessert.
Once in a long while, a can of condensed milk would appear, and my sister and I would be invited to spread it on bread, or even eat it straight from the can with a spoon.
As with so many of my mother’s parenting choices, the cooking of the Spam and its tinned brethren had a rich history that she chose not to share.
But of these foods, the only one that I still like — and have passed on to my children — is Spam.
My kids eat Spam because I ate it, and I eat it because my mother ate it: two generations and counting of comestible nostalgia, a sort of legacy.
Although its origin in the family is distanced by time, buried beneath the experience of the lazy weekend brunches of the succeeding generations, Spam functions as an unchanging, replenishable touchstone.
My friends find my love of Spam curious, despite the fact that Filipinos are known Spam lovers.
Eating Spam is an enactment of my Filipino identity, but there are many other foods that would do the job more authentically — including balut, a fertilized duck egg, and dinuguan, a soup made from pig’s blood, neither of which I would be willing to eat today.
Canned food in general is something I avoid, just as I avoid boxed mac and cheese or packaged ramen or anything you eat without the significant preparation it really deserves.
I know that Spam — on a gustatory level — is hard to defend.
On opening a can of Spam, one is first assaulted by a peculiar smell, reminiscent of Alpo; then, by that toxic pink color, heightened by a layer of glistening aspic; and lastly, by that jellyish texture, a texture best left to jelly.
But sliced into slabs and fried to a crisp, served with garlic-fried rice and a sunny-side-up egg, it is delicious.
If you wanted to, you could even eat it straight from the can, as soldiers did during World War II — and indeed, Spam’s presence in the rations of Americans fighting in the Philippines during that war is how it ended up on the Filipino culinary radar in the first place.
At the start of the war, my mother’s family was doing rather well. They lived in the walled city of Intramuros, a section of Manila famed for its colonial buildings and tree-lined avenues. My grandfather, a doctor, was working for the Americans as a representative for the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. He was half-American himself, and he and his father and my grandmother and a growing family (six children at the start of the war, then seven, then six again) lived together, attended by servants, in a house built in the Spanish style. When the Japanese invaded, the servants were let go. My maternal great-grandmother, living in the provinces, worked out a deal with a Japanese officer to allow her to transport food to her family in the city — a plan that worked, for a time, until it didn’t. My great-grandfather was sent to the internment camp in Santo Tomas while bombs and battles raged around the Pacific and the civilians began their great struggle against hunger.
It is impossible to really understand the love for Spam in the Philippines without understanding that struggle. The country was at war for nearly four years. The liberation of Manila was one of history’s greatest scenes of carnage. By the time of the Japanese surrender, a lot had been endured by those lucky enough to survive, but there was not much food around. What food existed was in the hands of Americans, American rations; and what the soldiers could share, they did.
My uncle liked to tell the story of a G.I. whom he and the neighborhood kids ran into at the end of the war. The American waved the kids over, happy to learn that they spoke English. No doubt moved by their skin-and-bones appearance, he began to hand out what he had of his rations: Hershey bars, canned corn and condensed milk. He opened them up, and the kids ate it all. He then offered them — as a joke — cigarettes, Marlboro Reds, which they greedily accepted, and which he lit with a chunky, silver lighter. “Your mother was 11. Even the 8-year-olds were smoking. We were all smoking and coughing and laughing. Him, too.”
No doubt this G.I., who wasn’t much more than a kid himself, was enjoying a moment of humor after having spent the last years of his youth knee-deep in the carnage of a brutal war. I see him standing there, digging around in his bag to see what he had left, laughing with his big American teeth, the kids pulling on his pants legs with their small hands, their eyes wild with hope, asking for more to eat. Him saying: “All I’ve got for you, all that’s left, is one more Hershey bar ... cigarettes, which you don’t like ... and look, lucky you. A can of Spam!”
icons on the left to see existing comments.
0 General Document comments
0 Sentence and Paragraph comments
0 Image and Video comments
General Document Comments 0
