Bacon Spam (Not In Your Inbox)

Spam wasn't always something you got in your email, before Canter & Siegel unleashed an era of junk onto the Internet, Spam was simply a "tasty" canned pork meat product. Soak that in for a minute... canned pork meat product.... yes, its as good as it sounds. Well Spam still is that tasty canned meaty goodness, and what could make it better, except maybe a Monty Python skit? Bacon of course!!!

When I was a younger man I remember playing a game called "Pass the Pigs". You had a couple of plastic pig "dice" that you tossed and depending on how they landed you scored point, don't really recall the specifics but I do remember the miniature "pig dice". They were no bigger than a nickel, and you are probably wondering why I bring it up, well as you can see from the picture, this can 'o spam has "Real Hormel Bacon". That may be true, but what I did not realize is there is some form of actual pygmy pig, that the game used life size replicas of for the game.

It is from those wee tiny nickel sized pygmy pigs that Hormel harvests the bacon from for this Spam product. I am sure there is a very hi-tech process for this, miniature farms no bigger than a conference room, tiny little smokehouses to hang the pork belly in and I am sure a fine laser guided slicing mechanism to slice the end product into the microscopic strips of bacon seen here. I am assuming there is bacon in the meat product, there are some dark flecks, but those could just be some other part of the pig that got ground up.

It didn't have any real bacon aroma, it smelled like, well, canned pork meat product. I fried up a couple of slices for a sandwich, it was o.k. but on my second sandwich I put on some "instant bacon" (review coming soon) and that made it much better. If only I had tried this all out after the advent of Baconnaise, that would have been a GREAT sandwich, I'll have to try it again with some of the creamy Baconnaise goodness (once my local market gets it on the shelf). I have been checking Ralph's and Albertson's daily, soon I can feel it, all my sandwiches will be better.