Preppers’ PING!!
Five days into a semi-starvation themed military survival course, we were given Spam, one can to every four men. Best meal of my life.
I heard somewhere that Spam is the acronym for Synthetic Processed Artificial Meat.
Answer:
The shelf life of Spam, as indicated by the Hormel website, is "indefinate". It also states that spam will be safe to eat a lot longer than the Enjoy By date, although the flavor will decrease over time.
Any sealed(canned) container will remain safe to eat until a few things happen.
1) A break in the seal, through punctures or through corrosion of the metal.
2) Any kind of swelling of the container, or a outrush of gas upon opening.
The first is self-explanitory. The second is from bacteria build up in the container when it was sealed. Sometimes in the commercial canning industry cans get through that have not been sterilized properly. I'm not sure the exact number of these "tainted" cans that get through, but they are miniscule in comparison to the safe cans that make it through.
Also, remember that heat will do damage to canned foods. Keeping that can of spam in the pantry will allow it to keep much longer than it would in say the trunk of your car. It will still be safe to eat, and provide you with needed protein and sodium in an emergency, but it won't taste quite as good.
Hope this helps.
I just bought 50 15-ounce cans of Hormel chili at $0.60 a can with the coupon plus the store special. It’s not gourmet food, but if we get hungry, that’s a lot of adequate meals.
High fat and protein content, stores indefinitely and can be prepared/cooked in a multitude of ways. What’s not to like?
Popular product in Hawaii also...
They make some great food.
Mu-su-bi: Essentially nigiri style. sticky rice pressed into the bottom of a spam can, a nice thick slice of grilled spam, maybe some scrambled egg, and wrapped with a narrow strip of nori. Wrap it up in plastic wrap. Stick a couple in a day pack and they are Hawaiian energy bars.
Have eaten the stuff on a number of ocassions...While it’s edible, it’s probably at the bottom of my list of desirable meats...
Add a can of spray cheese and box of crackers and you’re on a show with Robin Leach.
When I was a kid, one of our favorite meals was fried Spam with pineapple sauce on top. Haven’t had that in years and not the least bit interested.
Hormel also makes Stagg brand chili.
I love SPAM! Fry it and serve on white bread with Dukes Mayonnaise. Awesome!
I picked up a taste for spam when I was in HI with USN. It is like a delicacy there where many survived on it during WW2. I like it grilled almost black. It goes well with reconstituted powdered eggs. I pick up a case or two whenever Costco has them on sale.
I have been trying to find Bacon-flavored Spam, but none of the local stores seem to have it...
:-(
The article didn’t say what products were doing well. Or why. Just the company overall.
I wonder if it is spam or their chili or whatever else it is they make?
If the spam - then is it due to people prepping or due to the bad economy and inflation of meat prices in the grocery store?
I would imagine the latter since us the number of us preppers is not huge (that I know of).
I don't eat it as a rule because I'm saving those cans. Sliced Spam, browned in a skillet is simply good as a sandwich with mustard. Also fried with an egg is good. I wonder if people are opening the can and eating it just like that without browning it to produce that good flavor? I would not eat it straight out of the can unless I had no way of browning it and that isn't going to happen because I've got several different fuels to provide cooking - enough for years of browning Spam.
I still need to get Dak ham and can't pass the Hormel products in the grocery store without getting something. All that meat just sitting on the shelf.
Most find consuming SPAM straight-from-the-can unappealing due to its intense flavor. SPAM’s easiest entry into one’s diet is as a pork sausage, bacon, or ham luncheon meat substitute. Keys to this use are quantity, thickness of slice, and skillet browning. This will mellow and use its flavor to good advantage.
One use I particularly enjoy is a small amount of diced skillet-browned SPAM added to eggs as they are being scrambled in the same skillet. Seasoned to taste and topped with a little cheese, this results in a very tasty and hearty breakfast produced with little effort. And doing so satisfies my appetite for either bacon or sausage, eliminating their use for that meal.
My introduction to SPAM was long ago. Though I didn’t care for it then, I revisited it as part of my ongoing search for tasty, nutritious, economical, long shelf-life, pantry food-stock which I could easily obtain and readily work into my consumption rotation. SPAM and other brand equivalents met and exceeded my requirements. Not only was this unexpected, I was pleasantly surprised that less of it was required than the fresh foods it replaced.
Indeed, I have been exploring other canned foods of my youth with similar results. Most of these foods saw wide use in WWII. Served unmodified from the can, they are blandly pleasant and soon boring. Modified with seasonings and additional ingredients they become tasty meals. Most have less expensive store brand equivalents indistinguishable from the original. And these too are quite useful pantry food-stocks.
So, as you can see, I endorse SPAM along with its WWII canned contemporaries as essential to the well-stocked food pantry necessary for comfortable rural life. Given SPAM’s and these others’ long shelf-lives, they should not only be integrated with a normal diet, they should also be part of anyone’s emergency and survival supplies considerations.
Given Hormel’s rising fortunes, this is likely already happenning world-wide.
