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.
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:
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