Where's the Speef?: Shoddy Goods 033
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I’m Jason Toon and when it comes to cheap ultraprocessed meat product, I grew up in a baloney household. But today on Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell, we’re serving up the kind of cheap meat that comes pressed into a can. Not, however, the brand you know best.
There’s only one iconic canned meat. When you picture a pink, greasy block of ultraprocessed hog parts sliding out of a rectangular can, you’re picturing a four-letter brand that starts with an S. It’s revered as a staple in places where fresh meat can be hard to come by, like Hawaii. It’s credited with winning World War II. But it’s also so loathed that we’re not even mentioning it in this newsletter, lest it get caught in some kind of filter.
Nowadays there’s a generic name that all the off-brand versions use: luncheon meat. But there was a time when The BIg S’s competitors still hoped to beat it at its own game, and turn their particular slab of offal into a household name. The 1940s and 1950s saw a slew of aspiring canned meatblocks hit the market.
They were pretty much the same mixture of pork shoulder, preservatives, salt, and whatever they swept up off the slaughterhouse floor. Like The Big S, they were cooked in a can that mostly aped that rectangular shape: this meat had corners. And most had a name that could have been mistaken for a real meat if either the speaker or the listener were very drunk. Presenting a buffet of pseudo-pork-prisms from the height/depths of the convenience century.
The Early Imitator: Prem
Just two years after Hormel introduced their tinned meat facsimile in 1937, Swift countered with Prem. The Big S hadn’t yet consolidated its hold on the leftover-pork-ingot market, so Prem was able to carve out a slimy little niche for itself. I assume “Prem” was supposed to evoke “premium”, which says a lot about just how bad the Great Depression must have been.
The Cavemen: Bif & Mor
As a copywriter, I spend a lot of my time shortening text. Any day I can reduce the character count is a good day. I have to admire Wilson’s for pursuing concision into the realm of semi-verbal grunting with these two wanna-meats. I wonder if anybody pitched “Mr” and “Bf”.
The Canadians: Speef & Spork
Founded by a rancher who was also one of the founders of the Calgary Stampede, Canada’s Burns Meats followed Hormel’s lead orthographically as well as gastronomically. Just take the name of a meat and replace the first consonant sound with “Sp”. Presto: Speef and Spork! Alas, that apprently wasn’t the magic that made The Big S a hit, and Speef and Spork disappeared by the early '60s. I’m just sorry we never got to see Spicken, Spurkey, Spish, and Spobster.
The Aussie: Wham
Australia’s history with canned meats precedes all this, with several brands of “camp pie” on the market since the 1910s. But by midcentury, that ol’ Yankee razzle-dazzle had made its way down under, via Kraft’s Australian operation. They figured out that adding one letter to “ham” gave it that boffo star-spangled sexiness so essential to pressed meats.
The Cosmopolitan: Jamonilla
Somehow, a Danish company turned this meat-adjacent product into a mainstay in American spheres of influence like Panama, the Phillippines, and Puerto Rico. It’s still a big seller in those places to this day. In Spanish, the name is a made-up dimunitive of “ham” you could translate as “Hamlet” - so maybe its Danish origins make sense after all.
The Barely Trying: Trim & Snack
C’mon, Imperial and Morrell respectively. You think you can play in the tin meat game without names that even vaguely resemble real meats? You couldn’t even be bothered to drop a random letter for a whimsical new moniker? No wonder your luncheon clumps got stuffed down the cultural memory hole.
The Survivor: Treet
Every Mad needs its Cracked. Every Dr. Pepper needs his Mr. Pibb. Every Britney needs her Christina. The dogged perpetual also-ran in this case is Treet, originally manufactured by Armour and still available with that label, now owned by Pinnacle Foods. Of course, Treet has its partisans, and there are as many taste-test faceoffs on YouTube as anyone could possibly watch.
But there are competitors and there are icons. Dwight Eisenhower never complained about Treet. Monty Python never made fun of it or turned it into a Broadway smash hit. There will never be superfans who change their middle names to “I Love Treet”, nor a Treet museum where they get married. And nobody will ever demand laws to keep all the Treet out of their email. Sometimes you have to settle for second-best.
Well, I can’t say I’m disappointed I didn’t live through this era of food invention and promotion. Was your family brand-name only when it came to food and drink, or did you get the knock-off cereals, soda, spreads and fake meats? What were the best named pretender brands in your area? Let us know in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
You guys getting hungry? Yeah, me neither. Regain your appetite with these pork-shoulder-free stories from Shoddy Goods past:
- 14 comments, 17 replies
- Comment
Aren’t you all there to be knock off cereals and so then spreads.
@Cerridwyn i live autocorrect. I have no clue what that was supposed to say
I remember this from the years past:
No branding whatsoever beyond the product name and a blue stripe with “quality guaranteed”.
@narfcake
https://m.xkcd.com/993
We had black and white plain label at our grocery store.
My ex was bar back at a very popular local bar when he was in school at Texas A&M. He said on cheap beer night, the kegs just said BEER on them. I’m sure drunk college students didn’t care.
And I actually like spam. It was a treat when I was younger. I like it fried, spam fried rice is pretty damn awesome if the person knows what they’re doing
POPSOCKETS! ROAD ROCKETS! SONNY CROCKETT! AWESOME!
@Cerridwyn Have you tried the gourmet flavors?
Here’s a couple teasers
@Cerridwyn @ybmuG SPAM! EGGS! SPAM! BACON! EGGS! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! AWESOME!
EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!
Perfect reply, @mediocrebot… as long as it’s with Spam.
@ybmuG some yes
@Cerridwyn
A college GF introduced me to Scrapple, which reminded me of Spam, but was massively grittier in texture.
I have not eaten it since, ever and will never eat it again.
I was all about Chek Cola when I was in my teens because it was as dirt cheap as I was dirt poor. We called it “weird guy soda” because oval driver Mark Martin was on the packaging.
Now that I’m decrepit years old, I think the only serious brand loyalty we have is to Peter Pan peanut butter. Wifey told me get that shit out of our house when I brought home a Jif because it was all they had.
Also, turns out Chek Cola sucks and I was a dumb kid.
@mikey
My uncle bought RC Cola and Faygo by the case, and we drank it that way too- working on roofs, doing siding, and working around the cattle farm.
Knock-off is a tricky term, there’ve always been a lot of local food brands around here. Some things like Breyers and Tastycake went nationwide. Acme had this area pretty much monopolized supermarketwise when I was a kid but there was a step van guy who sold Charles Chips and took orders for other stuff, I think did Wawa milk deliveries too. Frank’s Black Cherry Wishniak was something I liked that’s not around anymore, I can’t remember when I first tried Utz’ chips but they’re my favorite. I don’t remember when Acme introduced house brands but they’ve always been crap, but when Wegmans finally showed up we took some other folks advice and found that their house brands are great.
@aetris good point, local/regional brands that then come to a new area are sometimes hard to tell from knockoffs. Utz and Herr’s were new arrivals here once.
@aetris Not being near Acmes anymore, I do miss Ivins Spiced Wafers…
I went to high school with a guy who would smoke only GPC generic brand cigarettes. No idea whether he is still walking around or not. Personally I have always been a devotee of store-brand black cherry soda.
Meanwhile, no discussion of mysterious potted meat products would be complete without this gem from the 90s:
What about Underwood Deviled Ham? How did you miss that delicious canned meat? As for knockoff stuff, my Dad used to bring home government cheese peanut butter and spinach from the Army base. Just a big metal can with a plain label and black text
Eclipse coffee syrup, not Autocrat! (Yes, I grew up in Rhode Island and I love a good coffee cabinet!)
Growing up, we had store brands and I still mostly buy them, except for dish detergent (always Dawn) and powdered laundry detergent (Trader Joe’s brand until they stopped selling it, now Tide) and maybe a few other things.
There’s (or was when I grew up there in the 50’s) a U.K. sidetrack version of the compressed scrap meat product. There, we could buy deli-sliced (but not canned). homogenized, pink meat-stuff simply titled “luncheon meat”. Of course, we still have it here in the USA under the name Bologna or “baloney”.
Then there are also the parallel tracks carved by the Danish sourced, but American loved “Canned Ham”, in those oddly church window shaped cans.
And don’t forget the similar WW2 favorite canned Corn Beef, or Bully Beef, and the weirdly variant named but not-canned Corned Beef, Salt Beef, and stretching to Pastrami.
@user24193226
My parents bought and loved those canned ham from Denmark- I think they bought them at the Two Guys Department store.
They were Great Depression kids, so I suspect it was because they [and the hams] were cheap.
@PhysAssist @user24193226 that and the fact that they were shelf stable forever
@Cerridwyn
Like Twinkies!
Funny you mentioned the Danish. In Germany it’s called “Dänisches Frühstücksfleisch” (Danish breakfast meat), with Tulip still being the main brand.
Europe of course has a long tradition of turning inedible meat scraps or tougher pieces into something called sausage. Making sausages at home, canning was easier than stuffing everything into casings. Grind everything up, put it in glasses and heat-treat the glasses in a pressure cooker.
There are still small butcher shops that offer their own varieties of canned meat products. Not just spam-like bologna, but other varieties that are more like summer sausage.
Hamdingers made by local Patrick Cudahy was a staple of my childhood in Milwaukee.
@user85978837
Don’t see a lot of can goods that say keep under refrigeration right on the label!