Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam

There are few things more baffling than Britain's post-war obsession with Spam. Not the email variety – although that, too, is a loathsome by-product of Anglo-Saxon ingenuity – but the gelatinous pink slab that clings to the inside of its tin like a guilty secret.

Being of Dutch extraction, I was never conditioned to accept Spam as food. We had rookworst, leverworst, hutspot and all manner of other guttural delights – none of which required the application of a key to open, nor resembled something exhumed from the permafrost.

But here, in the land of warm beer and prawn cocktail crisps, Spam was a delicacy. In the 1960s, it was everywhere – on toast, with chips, grilled, fried, diced into salads, and served up in school dinners with all the enthusiasm of a soggy war memoir. It was as if the country had grown sentimental about rationing, and decided the only way forward was backwards – right back into a world where meat came in rectangles and had the consistency of a damp sponge.

Let’s be clear: Spam is not food. It’s what food becomes when it gives up. It’s mechanically reclaimed regret, held together with sodium and nostalgia.

The Americans, of course, inflicted it upon the world during the war, and it’s been haunting pantries ever since – like an edible landmine. The Hawaiians embraced it so fervently they now consume more Spam per capita than anywhere else on earth, which is a bit like saying you lead the world in facial eczema.

And then there’s the Monty Python sketch – the only reason Spam deserves to be remembered at all. A masterwork of absurdism featuring two bewildered customers in a café where every item on the menu contains Spam. One cannot order so much as a boiled egg without it arriving under a beige veil of reconstituted pig. It culminates in a chorus of Vikings singing “Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam!” – which, had it been used in Guantanamo, would certainly have been classified as torture.

It’s odd, isn’t it, that a nation so proud of its culinary heritage – its Bake Offs and Gastropubs and Pukka Pies – clung for so long to a relic of meat-based austerity. Spam was the edible equivalent of British Leyland: mass-produced, oddly shaped, and deeply unconvincing.

I once read that the name ‘Spam’ comes from ‘Spiced Ham’. I find this dubious. There’s as much spice in Spam as there is jazz in a Cliff Richard record. The only flavour it reliably delivers is salt, with undertones of industrial accident.

And yet – and yet – I have this gnawing suspicion that Farage, should he ever get anywhere near actual power, will mandate Spam as the national meat (along with compulsory ownership of XL Bullies). “Proper British protein,” he’ll call it – slapping it on a plate next to a fried egg and some Union Flag bunting, while declaiming against “woke bacon alternatives from Brussels.” It'll be rebranded Breksit Ham, served in schools, pubs, and probably lifeboats – because that's where he puts all his best ideas.

The fact that we still sell it, still eat it, still market it – now with variants like "Lite" and "Hot & Spicy" (presumably for those who like their abominations zesty) – is an indictment of our failure to move on as a civilisation.

I propose a simple solution: Spam should be consigned to the Imperial War Museum, exhibited under a glass dome, and labelled “Dietary Shellshock: 1939–1972”.

Then, and only then, can we be free.