My earliest memory of Spam goes back to a summer vacation in Romania in 1995. At a roadside picnic table, one of my relatives pulled out a can of it. My brother and I, ages 14 and 12, respectively, both born and raised in New York, recoiled in horror. My father said, “What? We ate this growing up. It’s good. Eat it.”
This was surprising. Spam, so American to me, was available on this side of the Iron Curtain? And my father, so granola, so opposed to processed foods at home, was a fan? And we were supposed to trust meat out of a tin after each of us had already fallen victim to violent food poisoning on this trip? My mother later admitted she regularly ate Spam while hiking in the Carpathian Mountains. She would heat cans of Spam on hot rocks. It was an easy nonperishable food.