Guam's Spam Story

There’s no denying my love for Spam. At the early age of 2, I was introduced to the blue and yellow tin that immediately become my favorite food, and in desperate times, the only food I would eat. I ate Spam breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Add on my Spam-themed 10th birthday party and you’d come to see that Spam played an important role in my childhood. My love for Spam has stuck with me through the years. Now, as a 19-year-old college student living in New York City with a packed daily schedule, it comes at no surprise that 6 cans of Spam sit in my pantry ready for me to crack open and enjoy at my convenience. My Spam story is similar to many CHamorus who share their own stories and relationships to the ultimate, mouthwatering canned meat product.

If you stare long enough at any traditional CHamoru fiesta table, you’ll start to notice a variety of dishes containing Spam.  Spam kelaguen ,  Spam musubi , Spam  kådu , and  Spam fried rice  are just some of the variations of dishes that come to mind. The product’s deep-rooted history in CHamoru culture, transformation in cultural meaning, and commodification by locals can be assessed to understand just how important this canned meat product has become for the island. Although Guam has incorporated a variety of canned meat products such as corned beef, Vienna sausage, and canned sardines, Spam stands out as the island favorite among the items. Approximately 30 miles long and 8 miles wide, the tiny island of Guam reigns today as the leader in Spam consumption per capita, with 16 cans consumed per person a year ( HormelFoods ). To understand how this particular canned meat became so popular on Guam, one must first examine its history and evolution, dating back to the early days of World War II.

According to the Hormel Foods website in a  Reader’s Digest article  by Meghan Jones, the first can of Spam was created in 1937 by Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota (Jones 2019). Towards the end of the Great Depression in the mainland, Spam was marketed as an inexpensive canned meat product for American working-class households. It then became more prevalent around the world in 1941 through the  Lend-Lease Act , allowing Hormel Foods to ship up to 15 million cans of Spam a week across the globe ( Jones 2019 ).  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Spam traveled with U.S. military troops as a high-calorie protein source during wartime conditions ( Cruz 2019 ). This “emergency food source” was eventually distributed to civilians around the Pacific undergoing food scarcity and insecurity. These communities, with a prolonged postwar U.S. military presence, acquired Spam first as a commodity and transformed it to befit their own gastronomies ( Etherington , 41). 

By 1919, Japanese forces occupied the Northern Mariana Islands, and in 1941, lukao or “kidnapped” Guam from the U.S. at the start of World War II ( Cruz 2019 ). Thousands of CHamorus were forced into Japanese internment camps, sacrificing their food to the hundreds of Japanese soldiers. In their 1944 attempt to recapture the island from Japan, U.S. forces bombed Guam and in several days, devastated vast areas of land ( Cruz 2019 ). Hundreds of self-sustaining CHamoru families were displaced from their homes in the destruction of their villages, farmland, and resources. Along with the destruction of native land came U.S. officials scrambling to “turn as much as two-thirds of the island into military installations” ( Cruz 2019 ). With the U.S. victorious in their attempts that same year, the CHamoru people were released from the internment camps in hopes of returning to their lands. However, during the immediate postwar period, the CHamoru population began to face malnutrition and food insecurity due to the loss of their farmlands and fishing grounds. Without their land, the CHamorus had no way of producing their own food. To their rescue came Spam, brought by U.S. troops as the ultimate “emergency food source” ( Etherington , 44). Worried about future threats to their food supply, the CHamorus “hoarded cases and cans” of their rations ( Cruz 2019 ). Seventy-eight years later, Spam remains but at the cost of many health and economic concerns the island is currently facing.

While many CHamorus might have been reluctant to accept Spam after generations of living off foods they mainly grew or caught, there was no other option but to include the canned meat in their diets. With fresh food hard to come by, Spam quickly transformed from an “emergency food source” to an “essential food source” ( Etherington,  44). The CHamorus had no choice but to eat what was available to them, which was mainly imported canned meats, including corned beef and Vienna sausage. However, Spam’s particular inexpensiveness, long shelf life, culinary versatility, and taste allowed it to become a favorite among the canned meat products.

To this day, Spam has figured well into the culture, health, and pantries of the CHamoru people. Several reasons as to how this particular canned meat made its way into the lives of the CHamorus explain how Spam was able to transcend national, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries (Tolentino,  Guampedia ). Four main reasons explain the CHamoru acceptance of Spam:

In both the war and the postwar periods, these characteristics of Spam attracted the CHamoru taste palate to continually incorporate it into the shared cuisine. But aside from these characteristics exists a set of symbolic meanings the CHamorus have assigned to the beloved canned meat product.

In those harsh times of food shortages and starvation, Spam served the CHamorus as a symbol of “American generosity” in gratitude towards the U.S. who relieved them of some the war’s extensive impacts. The single 12-ounce, blue and yellow tin of Spam commemorated CHamoru freedom and U.S. loyalty. In several advertisements of Guam’s 60th liberation anniversary, illustrations and commemorations of Guam’s postwar story appear on Spam cans (Tolentino,  Guampedia ).

Not only did Spam represent the heroism and generosity of the U.S. military, it was also a symbol of modernity, urbanization, and development to those CHamorus whose lives were affected by the war. With a majority of the CHamoru diet consisting of food they either grew or caught, Spam, in its manufactural and industrial qualities, transcended their cultural boundaries to include such a progressive, contemporary food item in their kitchens.

Similar to the many other western commodities introduced to Guam, Spam became a large indicator of status. Although Spam’s versatility reflected the unique cooking techniques and innovations of the CHamorus, Spam’s usage in the kitchen carries a set of class implications. 

Geftao, or the CHamoru word for “generosity,” is a principle of CHamoru culture that has been expressed since the time of the ancient CHamorus. To this day, on the island, CHamorus consider hospitality a necessity in interactions amongst each other and with outsiders. Inafa’maolek, a combination of “reciprocity” and “harmony,” explains the prioritized CHamoru tradition of gift-giving. During the holidays, people often give Spam to loved ones as a gift of luxury. CHamoru scholar and activist Craig Santos Perez, in his poets.org article “ SPAM’s Carbon Footprint ,” states 

“Spam has a place not only in the stomachs of Guam’s people, but in our hearts as well. Here Spam is considered a gourmet luxury and is often presented as a gift at birthdays, weddings, and funerals. Hormel even made a Hot and Spicy Spam especially formulated for Guam with Tabasco already added to it!” (Perez 2010).

The giving of Spam, in conjunction with the commemorative Spam advertisements as gifts of gratitude to the U.S., demonstrate the canned meat item’s importance in signifying how generous someone is in giving and how grateful someone might be in receiving. Similar to the way CHamorus equated Spam with luxury, Rachel Laudan in The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage, shares the Hawai’ian reasons for their incorporation of Spam:

"Locals [the diverse peoples of Hawaii] then, understandably regard SPAM as thrifty and tasty, a food of childhood, a food of family meals and picnics at the beach, a food of convenience. A food of convenience, moreover, with a certain status, harking back to the time when buying something canned conveyed affluence and keeping up with the times. And a food welcomed by many of their relatives in Asia in the hungry days after World War II" (Laudan).

Laudan sums up several reasons explaining the significance of Spam to Hawai’i, Guam’s Pacific neighbor. Although the combination of these reasons has allowed the CHamoru people to fall in love with the product, Spam did not always carry positive connotations to Guam. It held a series of negative implications toward CHamorus during wartime with many continually affecting the following generations.

Despite Spam’s uplifting characteristics, the CHamorus were not always entirely accepting of the canned meat. For many postwar surviving CHamorus, Spam was a symbol of suffering. The CHamorus withstood a number of the war's devastating impacts, including the destruction of their lands and a lack of gratitude by the US government to lessen the effects of war trauma. Some of the surviving CHamorus never felt truly "liberated," as many families were denied from reclaiming their lands by the U.S. Government even after the war’s end ( Rapadas , 36). With Spam being one of the only “gifts” the U.S. had to offer, it serves surviving CHamorus as a critical reminder of those hard times. For many, it provoked feelings of helplessness in re-establishing their pre-war lives. While the immediate postwar CHamorus might have avoided Spam for its reminders of the war’s devastating impacts, many CHamorus today still associate Spam with imperialist and colonial manifestations ( Etherington , 42).

Along with the U.S. military’s arrival to Guam came a number of invasive species to the island. The brown tree snake was introduced during the immediate postwar period in the late 1940s after some active military members of the Admiralty Island group of northern Papua New Guinea landed on Guam (Tolentino,  Guampedia ). The  fanihi , an indigenous fruit bat on Guam, already impacted by the days of CHamoru hunting, have suffered through the brown tree snake predation (Wiles, 156). The snake has threatened a variety the island’s ecologies and continually drive native birdlife towards extinction ( Etherington , 46). 

The snake demonstrates how U.S. imperial and colonial structures came to impact the preexisting biodiversity of Guam and various other Pacific islands and Indigenous lands. Not only were Guam’s ecologies severed, but their foodways have also been affected at the expense of the island’s extensive history of war and militarism. In the same way, the 12-ounce canned meat product brought a series of impacts toward preexisting, native foodways. The U.S. imperial and capitalist values, through the introduction of the brown tree snake and of Spam, no doubt affected Guam ecologies and CHamoru mindsets alike.

Among many Americans today exists the “Spam stigma:” the ambivalent attitude towards Spam as a “lowbrow dietary stape,” as Ty Matejowsky claims in his scholarly article “ SPAM and Fast Food ‘Glocilization’ in the Philippines .” While the Hormel Foods website “neither suggests nor implies that SPAM is anything other than canned luncheon meat,” it is hard for many American consumers to disassociate SPAM from its suspicions as the “quintessential mystery meat,” even more dubious than hotdogs in the industrial food complex ( Ku , 193). With this, many Americans continue to disregard Spam for its implications of culinary unsophistication and substandardness. These Spam detractors are unable to look past its appearance as the “pink gelatinous loaf of meat,” but to many Pacific islanders that grew up on Spam, it serves as a culinary item of great importance ( Ku , 200). In exposing her frustrations towards the average American Spam critic, Josephine Cariño, in her Vida essay “ Spam Stigma: An Open Letter to White People ,” states:

“To you, Spam is not some exotic delicacy up for grabs for you to culturally appropriate. But Spam is not your b*tch, not your prize, not the next addition to your lunchtime Buddhabowl. In fact, your disdain for Spam reveals so much about the position of privilege and power that you and the rest of bougie white America possess. If you’re thinking "Why should I care?" at this point, I’ll tell you: it’s because shaming people for eating Spam and other “undesirable” food shows your outdated Orientalism, your high horse, your contempt for all things “un-American”—in short, it shows the imbalance in a power dynamic that not only denigrates people of color, but also stems from the American colonial systems historically put in place to subjugate POCs” (Cariño 2018).

Here, Cariño sums up ideas that many Spam eaters of color share worldwide. To be considered “less human” for eating the very thing the U.S. had to give in the first place has triggered many subjugated communities around the Pacific. Spam has also been associated with the lower-class diet as a budgeted food similar to Ramen Noodles and Cheez-Whiz (Matejowsky 2007). Thus, for people in positions of privilege to repeatedly subjugate Spam-eating communities promotes the imperial and colonialist systems harbored by white Americans throughout history that continue to haunt many Indigenous peoples. Specifically on Guam, the stigma persistently haunts CHamorus due to Guam’s record-breaking position as the world’s largest consumer of Spam per capita (Matejowsky 2007). To know that the average CHamoru eats 16 cans of Spam per year must nauseate many Americans.

Although it may take an acquired taste to enjoy the product for some CHamorus, many of us are born into the “Spam life.” For many CHamorus, including myself, childhood memories and association have far outweighed its nutritional value, composition, and social stigma. Yet, while the “Spam life” exists among many CHamorus and Pacific islanders born into it, there are many who continue to regard Spam as an “unappetizing reminder of the widespread deprivation brought on by World War II” ( Matejowsky 2007 ). Indeed, the atrocities of the war far outweigh its pardoning characteristics. Although Matejowsky, states that “SPAM's popularity suffered no real setback once government restrictions were lifted and quality meats were again made available,” the product still carried heavy burdens for postwar CHamorus who were unable to return to their lives before the war ( Matejowsky 2007 ).

The term “gastrocolonialism,” “coined by Craig Santos Perez, refers to “the ways in which capitalism is more than just a structure of control and disempowerment: it is also something we experience through our changing food systems” ( Chao 2021 ). Perez describes American capitalist and imperialist systems as reckoning impacts towards the identities of colonized communities around the world. Spam’s role in the transformation of CHamoru foodways, which were once entirely based on fresh and natural products, to incorporate processed foods is something cultural scholars largely consider today. 

While the introduction of Spam to Guam largely influenced a shift in CHamoru identity as a whole, CHamorus and many other neighboring Pacific Islanders, have transformed the commodity of Spam and have tied in their own meanings. Perez, in his Kenyon Review article “ I eat therefore I SPAM ” states, “SPAM is a Pacific rite of passage” as another aspect of Pacific identity that CHamorus display time and time again (Perez 2013). In making its way into Pacific genealogies, Spam pushed past the cultural boundaries of those colonized communities and became a “shoo-in” among many Pacific island identities. 

In attempts to dismiss "gastrocolonialism," CHamorus have incorporated Spam into the local cuisine in a variety of ways. In doing so, the CHamoru people indigenized Spam, transforming it into “something new, different, and expressive of a local cultural identity” (Tolentino,  Guampedia ). They took Spam and generated an intrinsic identity that, to this day, challenges western values, perceptions, and hegemony. To the CHamoru people, Spam has become a cultural item that takes on deep-seated qualities of agency, history, and character, something they can rely on, relate to, and identify with under their own terms. Yet, while CHamorus were able to transform Spam’s cynical meanings in a more positive light under cultural and personal identities, many believe its nutritional values have caused Guam to “seep through the cracks.”

While it may have helped many postwar CHamorus overcome malnutrition and food insecurity, Spam itself has often been considered by nutrition experts as “unhealthy.” According to the Hormel Foods website, “a single 2-ounce serving of Spam contains about 180 calories, 16 grams of fat, 40 milligrams of cholesterol, and 790 milligrams of sodium” ( Jones 2022 ). With the island currently suffering from a public health crisis, Patrick Luces, a project coordinator at the Guam DPHSS, in Manny Cruz’s  Pacific Daily News article  claims that a strong reliance on canned foods, a lack of physical activity, and several other contributing factors are causes of the problem (Cruz 2019). 

While a number of researchers continue to find solutions to Guam’s health crisis, many fingers point to Spam and the multitude of “emergency foods” introduced during WWII to the island. The CHamoru diet is claimed to be just one of the many lasting impacts of the U.S. military’s presence on Guam. Yet, while many CHamorus are aware of their food choices and consumption of canned foods, Spam has been made so readily available and convenient that many might find it hard to break ties with the canned meat. On the island, today, you’ll find Spam at any fast-food joint, cafe, or diner. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and even KFC offer Spam in their breakfast menus with some being available 24/7. Walking down any grocery or  Mom n’ Pop store , you’ll have the chance to choose from SPAM® Classic, SPAM® Lite, SPAM® Less Sodium, SPAM® Hot and Spicy, SPAM® Hickory Smoke, and even SPAM® Chorizo (a local favorite). The wide selection of Spam items around the island, made readily available at one’s earliest convenience, may help explain the cause of Guam’s enduring health crisis.

While not all CHamoru Spam stories might be optimistic, there is no denying the product’s influence over the island’s culture, history, and identity. Its implicit, evolved meanings, from what was once an “emergency food source,” to an “essential food,” to a “rite of passage,” has sparked an evolution in the island’s cultural identity ( Etherington , 44/ Perez 2013 ). In pushing past cultural and culinary boundaries, Spam’s incorporation into the local diet ignited an influx of processed foods to be included in CHamoru cuisine, which once only included fresh foods from local farms. Although some CHamorus are unable to look past Spam as an item of American "gastrocolonialism" carrying implicit capitalist meanings, Guam has continuously secured its position in the global culinary world as its highest consumer per capita. 

While some wartime folks might have said something along the lines of “there is nothing more American than Spam,” many CHamorus today might admit that “there is nothing more CHamoru than Spam.” The island stuck with Spam all those years, despite its imperialist implications, social stigma, and nasty nutrition. But there is no separating one from the other. The enormous CHamoru love for Spam, uncontested by any other nation, country, or island in the world, is certainly something even I, as a Spam-loving 19-year-old who had a Spam-themed 10th birthday party, can attest to.