September 24, 2014 • 31 mins
This famous Hormel Foods product was invented in the 1930s to make use of a surplus of shoulder meat from pigs. Not only was it an instant hit in the U.S., it also played a huge role in WWII and shaped the cuisines of many Pacific Island nations.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, do you
remember recently on our Facebook page and we had that
weird influx of self published the book spam? Yeah, Like
(00:24):
suddenly just tons of posts were showing up of people
promoting their published books that often had nothing to do
with history. No, none of them, And that was the
only thing and they had in common was that none
of them were about history. Otherwise they were by different people,
they were posted from different accounts, they were in different genres.
It was very strange. And because I was wondering maybe,
(00:47):
you know, maybe there had been some article but had
gotten passed around that was like to promote your e
book post on random people's Facebook pages, I posted on
our Facebook page to say sort of, hey, listeners, any
of you how have any idea why this might be happening? Um.
A couple of people really went out of their way
to yell at us and call us idiots for even
(01:07):
asking that question. Most people kind of shrugged their shoulders
virtually about it. A few people gave us suggestions, who
are trying to like track down exactly what was going on,
but a couple of people said, you know, it would
be cool is if you did an episode about spam
the food. Not spam like the unwanted ecommunication, but spam
(01:30):
the food. And I can't get behind that because I
will loudly and proudly say I quite enjoy spam. Yeah.
Well uh, And immediately from just the few facts that
I already knew about spam's influence on various cuisines in
the wake of World War Two, I was like, yeah,
let's do that. That sounds actually pretty interesting and awesome.
(01:51):
And then that led to several other people chim chiming
in with interesting tidbits about spam and history. So that
is what we were talking about today. Thank you random
people who put their weird e books on our Facebook page.
It was a journey, but we got to a cool
episode idea. But I like sharing the journeys. Sometimes a
(02:11):
lot of times people ask us how we come up
with these things. Well that's an example. So yes, today
we were going to talk about spam's history and how
spam played a part in some pretty important historical events,
namely World War two and the Korean War, so in
case anyone does not know, spam is made by Hormel Foods.
(02:34):
George A. Hormel was born in eighteen sixty in Buffalo,
New York. Now, their last name was originally pronounced Hormal
to rhyme with normal, and it's not totally clear when
Hormel became Hormel Um because we've both been saying Hormel
all our lives, and for the sake of consistency, we're
just gonna go with Hormel. That was definitely what the
(02:55):
company was calling itself by the time spam was invented.
So the Hormel family moved to Toledo, Ohio when George
was just six, and he worked in his father's tannery
after school. The Panic of eighteen seventy three meant that
the family found itself meeting additional income, so at the
age of twelve, George left school so that he could
(03:17):
spend more time working and make more money for the family.
After a few brief stints and a couple of other jobs,
he wound up working at his uncle's meat packing business,
and he worked there until he was nineteen, and George
continued to work in different jobs Throughout his young adulthood.
He was working as a traveling salesman when he found
a meat shop for sale in Austin, Minnesota, where he
(03:39):
was passing through while he was doing some business in
his sales and he bought this meat shop and he
opened it, putting his experience at his uncle's meat packing
operation into practice and opening his own meat business. Soon
he really wanted the business to be more than just
a butcher's shop, so he borrowed some money, found an investor,
and ablished George A. Cormel and Company. The George was
(04:03):
just G. E O with period after it, and they
operated out of an abandoned creamery that was in and
at that point he was thirty one years old, all
of the United States biggest meat packing operations were in Chicago,
and here he was in Austin, Minnesota, hundreds of miles
away from that sort of nexus of industry. And he
was also brand new. He was a small business in
(04:26):
an industry that at that point was completely dominated by
really established, longtime powerhouses. And he also didn't actually have
some of the equipment that he was going to need
to be, uh, you know, a large scale meat packer.
For example, he did not have refrigerated railed cars at
his disposal. Those have been around since eighteen seventy eight,
(04:47):
but George did not have any until after the turn
of the century. So George Hormel needed to set himself
apart in some way. Since he couldn't just go head
to head with all these giant established meat packing companies,
he decided to focus on two things. The first was pork,
since more of the pig carcass was used than in
(05:07):
many other food animals, and quality, so when other businesses
were cutting their pork products with filt with fillers, he
really stuck as much as he could just to meet
that came from pigs and the company incorporated in nineteen
o one, and by nine four they were slaughtering a
million hogs each year. George Hormel's son Jay, He had
(05:30):
other sons as well, but Jay is the one who
plays a part in this part of the story. He
was a veteran of World War One, having served as
chief quartermaster in the American Expeditionary Forces. Jay came back
from the war with a sense of what canned goods
could do in terms of feeding an army, so he
encouraged Hormel to look into focusing on canned meat products.
(05:53):
The company's first canned ham came out in nineteen six.
In nineteen twenty nine, George Hormel retired and Jay took
at the Helm after his father was no longer part
of the business. And at this point Hormel introduced Didnty
Moore beef stew and Hormel Chili UH. Those both came
out in at about the same time. The Hormel Company
(06:15):
recognized that it had a surplus of shoulder meat from pigs. Now,
this wasn't a particularly popular cut of meat because neatly
removing the meat from the bone was a really time
and labor intensive process, and because a lot of consumers
thought that it was inferior to other cuts of pork,
like ham. And what the Hormel Company decided to do
(06:37):
was to grind up this shoulder meat along with some
ham and add salt, water, a bit of sugar, and
some sodium nitrate. That last ingredient preserves the color of
the meat and it also inhibits bacterial growth. Uh and
today's spam also includes potato starch, but that was not
in the original It was added later to keep the
liquid from seeping out of the meat and forming a
(06:58):
gelatinous layer on top, which I remember seeing periodically and
hands when I was a kid, and it was indeed
kind of gross. Yeah, that was in the eighties when
they made that change. Um. This new product's name was
coined by Kenneth Dagonau, who was not only a Broadway
actor but also the brother of a Hormel VP. He
(07:21):
won a hundred dollars for his efforts. It's allegedly a
portmanteau of spiced and ham, but the specifics on that
are really not documented, and Hormel claims that what it
really stands for is a closely guarded secret that makes
it sound like it's uh, somehow secretly spelling out horrible
(07:41):
things that could be contained in it. But the important
thing is that spam took the world by storm, and
we're going to talk about that after we have a
quick ad break. And now we'll get to spam and
how it came to dominate the market. Yeah. So spam
made its entry into the market in n seven and
its launch was accompanied by a huge advertising campaign, and
(08:03):
it builds spam is suitable for every meal and for snacks.
Spam was basically an instant hit, and it took eighteen
percent of the market share for canned ham in its
first year. That is hugely significant. The US was starting
to recover somewhat from the Great Depression, but overall, people
were really excited about having access to an inexpensive, shelf
stable source of meat. Plus it's really long shelf life
(08:26):
meant that you could stock up when you had extra
money and you would have like a nice little go
to in your pantry of edibles. Spam also got an
endorsement from George Burns and Gracie Allen on their radio
show There's a Charming Depending on Your Taste print ad
for both Spam and the show, in which George says
(08:47):
to Gracie, Gracie, if a strange man offered to buy
you lunch, what would you say? And then Gracie replies, spam.
I think it's charming, but it is pretty Basically everything
those two did was charming to me. Um. Also on
the print ad was the copy cold or Hot Spam
hits the spot Cold bits Spam and vegetable mold Spam
(09:10):
and salad sandwiches, Hot Spam and eggs, Spam and waffles,
Baked Spam, spam Burgers. A singing radio commercial also came
out in the forties that began and ended with the
words spam, spam, spam, spam, and to look at it,
as I did look at it many times since I
was doing research, it looks a lot like the Monty
(09:31):
Python sketch, but in reality it was sung to the
tune of My Body Lies over the Ocean. Now. I
just wish someone could convince Terry Jones to sing the
spam song in his family d voice to my Body
Lies over the Ocean. I bet we could. Would will
start a campaign. World War Two really launched spam into
(09:51):
the American patriotic consciousness. US residents were encouraged to give
up beef and premium cuts of other meats so that
they could help the war effort, and spam was a
handy alternative. Yeah. So, while people were eating spam out
of necessity towards the end of the Great Depression because
it was cheap and they didn't have a lot of money,
this time it was more of a sacrifice to support
(10:11):
the United States UM. The Hormel Company, along with other
meat producers, made specially packaged army versions of spam. These
were basically extremely large spam loaves and olive drab tins.
Then they weren't branded as spam with that distinctive blue
spam label. They contained some extra salt so that they
(10:32):
could withstand the temperature extremes of all the places that
the troops were deployed. Uh. There were also some ordinary
cans of spam that were basically bought in a pinch
to try to make ends meet for the men's rations.
Hormel wound up providing at least one hundred million pounds
of spam during World War Two. That's a lot of spam.
(10:55):
It's so much spam. It's a running theme in World
War two soldiers discussions of the war and for the troops.
The word spam actually came to mean any kind of
processed and preserved meat, and it was on the menu
a lot. It's often seemed like it was three meals,
three meals a day, every single day. So spam three
meals a day didn't literally need mean brand name spam,
(11:17):
but processed meat three meals a day. Yeah, People basically
thought of all of that stuff as spam. It's similar
to how all tissues are Kleenex, and that is the
thing that Hormil tries so hard to come back. In
nineteen sixty six, when the Hormail company was celebrating its
seventy five birthdays, why D. Eisenhower wrote in a letter
(11:39):
to a retired Hormil president saying, quote, I ate my
share of spam, along with millions of other soldiers. I'll
even confess to a few unkind remarks about it. Uttered
during the strain of battle, you understand, But as former
commander in chief, I believe I can still forgive you
for your only sin sending us so much of it.
(12:02):
That's so much of it meant that a lot of
servicemen swore they would never touch another can of spam
once the war was over. And while this may have
been true at least temporarily, many people who had sworn
never to touch another piece of spam wound up feeling
a little nostalgic for it once the war was over.
Eating spam took on this patriotic air, and it was
bolstered this concept of patriotism linked to spam by Hormel's
(12:26):
advertising campaign, which tied spam to wholesome values and patriotic spirit,
and that advertising plan went on throughout the fifties. It
was also bolstered by a sixty member dance troup known
as the Hormel Girls, who toured around in USO fashion
after the end of the war after getting their start
in n I hope we have pictures of those I
(12:49):
saw a couple. I did not find any that we
can like put in our blog or anything. There are
some that could be a great Halloween costume. The company
sation of nostalgian patriotism meant that spams Heyday in the
US really ran through the fifties and the sixties. Cookbooks
featured spam is an ingredient in all kinds of dishes,
(13:11):
but as the seventies crept in, spam's popularity started to
fade a bit. On December fifteenth, nineteen seventy the last
skit on that night's episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus
was the infamous Spam sketch, in which a couple goes
to a cafe where they're serving a lot of spam,
(13:31):
and then there are vikings who also sing about spam. Then,
on December thirty one, nineteen seventy four, episode of mash
Hawkeye and Trapp or John Save Radar's Pet lamb for
being slaughtered for a feast by sculpting a new one
out of spam. Weird Al Yankovic's Spam song sung to
the tune of Our E m Stand came out in nine,
(13:52):
at which point the can meat had really become cemented
in the American consciousness as both a joke and junk food.
People started to think of spam as mystery meat made
of remnants, the way that hot dogs are reported to be,
even though its ingredients had not changed. Aside from that
addition of potatoes starts that we talked about earlier, and
today people really kind of think of spam as dated
(14:15):
and cheap, at least most people, yeah, in the United States.
This is not the case in several other parts of
the world. So to talk about spam in other parts
of the world, we need to zip back to World
War to you for a minute. In the United States,
the Lend Lease Act was passed on March eleventh, ninety one,
(14:35):
and as its name suggests, the Lend Lease Act allowed
the United States to lend or lease supplies and materials
to Allied nations without payment if doing so was quote
vital to the defense of the United States. So this
was a way for the United States to help the
war effort without actually committing troops, which would happen eventually
(14:56):
after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December seven
of the same year. Through the Lend Lease Act, spam
made its way to Russia. In Nikita Kushchev's memoir, speaking
of World War Two, he says, quote, there were many
jokes going around in the army, some of them off
color about American spam, but it tasted good. Nonetheless, without spam,
(15:17):
we wouldn't have been able to feed our army. Spam
also made its way to several other parts of the
world through the Lend Lease Act and through the presence
of American troops during the war, along with other military actions.
So we're going to talk specifically about Hawaii, which at
this point was not yet a state, as well as
the Philippines and South Korea. And in Hawaii, spam's influence
(15:40):
came from two sources. One was the American g i
s who were stationed there or who passed through Hawaii
on their way to other parts of the Pacific. The
other was Hawaii's Japanese population. So during World War two,
in the continental United States, the government forced many Japanese
Americans into internment camps. This is absolutely a thing that
(16:01):
is on the list for podcast episode later on. UM
consequently spam sometimes because it makes an appearance in Japanese
American food because it was one of the foods that
was being served in the camps. But Hawaii was not
yet a state, so the United States government could not
really begin interning its citizens. I mean, you could make
(16:23):
an argument that the United States government shouldn't have been
interning its citizens without due process in the first place.
It's super did not have that authority to do in Hawaii. Also,
the Japanese population of Hawaii was just too big to
be interned. There were way too many people of Japanese ancestry.
The camps that would have been required were too large
(16:45):
for the islands themselves to be able to support. There
was just no way that the United States could do
in Hawaii what it was doing in the continental United States. Instead,
to combat this perceived threat from people with Japanese ancestry,
restrictions were placed on the movements and activities of people
(17:06):
that were of Japanese descent in Hawaii. So Japanese Hawaiians
were banned from deep sea fishing, which had been one
of the ways that they primarily source their food for
the Japanese community. Because of Hawaii's remote location, it's landscape
and the available food sources, the easiest protein source for
Japanese Hawaiians to use to replace what they've lost from
(17:28):
deep sea fishing was spam. Consequently, spam has been incorporated
into many Japanese dishes, and these very based on different
ethnic groups who live in Japan, but in particular there's
a lot of sort of Hawaiian Japanese spam fusion. There's
a Yummy restaurant here in Atlanta that does a yummy
um spam entrede with gravy and deliciousness, and I absolutely
(17:53):
love it. Uh. The most famous example of the spam
dishes that they were making at this time is spam musubi,
which is spam over rice. It's wrapped in nori seaweed,
and it's sometimes erroneously called spam sushi. It does kind
of resemble a sushi role, but musubi is its more
accurate name. Today. Hawaii is, of course a state and
(18:16):
consumes more spam than any other state, and the island
of Waikiki hosts an annual spam jam Let's go um.
Thanks to the presence of g I s during World
War Two and an ongoing military presence thereafter, spam also
became very popular in Guam and Okinawa. In Korea and Japan,
(18:38):
citizens were really just desperately suffering during World War Two.
As a side note, if you have not seen the
Japanese film Grave of the Fireflies, this will give you
an idea of how desperately hard things were for Japanese
citizens during the war. Canned meats like spam really saved
people's lives and consequently became incorporated into local cuisines there
(19:01):
as well. In South Korea, this continued during the Korean War.
American soldiers station they're not considering spam to be particularly
valuable or important. We're happy to use it as trade
and to increase goodwill, and they would also sell it
on the black market later on and during the Korean War,
the United States Army's Postal Exchange or p X was
(19:24):
often the only place that people could get meat. Spam
was really what was available, and since people couldn't afford
to buy it necessarily from the p X, it really
came to be considered a luxury um. It's an ingredient
in a dish called boud aid gay, which I hope
I am pronouncing correctly, which is also called military stew,
(19:44):
and that's basically a thick stew that also includes Korean
ingredients like kimchi. A fried slab of pork called pew
yuck was also part of Korean cuisine before the introduction
of spam, and spam became a replacement for pork in
that dish when people couldn't get ahold of regular pork.
So spam is undoubtedly an economy class food in the
(20:06):
United States, but it's a little more expensive in Korea,
and this association with scarcity and expense from earlier times
means that today it's frequently given as a really high
class gift. Often this is part of a really elaborate
gift box that includes other foods. Korea is consequently the
world's second largest consumer of spam after the United States,
(20:29):
and spam similarly became popular in the Philippines as an
after effect of U S military presence. Today in the Philippines,
it's often purchased outside of the country by people who
are traveling for pleasure or business, and then brought home
with them as traditional homecoming gifts. Uh. This means a
lot of times if you're in duty free shops at
(20:50):
airports that cater to a lot of Filipino travelers, there
will be spam in the duty free shop. And spam
is treated in the Philippines on both the black and
the gray markets. And there are actually nine different legitimately
available varieties of spam there. There's even a Turkey version
for the nation's Muslim population. I wonder what that tastes like.
I also wonder what that tastes like. Um. The reason
(21:12):
that there are is a black market at a grain
market for spam is that there are some restrictions on
imports in Philippines, which means there's more demand for spam
than is actually allowed to be imported. Um. And when
when you look at the numbers of the number of
cans sold versus the number of people allowed to sell it,
it just doesn't add up. There is additional spam coming
(21:36):
from somewhere. So there's a legitimate argument to be made
here that all of these examples are examples of undo
American influence on other cultures. But in the case of
spam in particular, local cuisines have really taken spam and
then absorbed it and made it into something that is
(21:56):
uniquely their own, whereas in the United States people were
usually basically using spam as a substitute for other meat
rather than making something new and uniquely spam out of it.
And today's spam is distributed in more than fifty countries
and it's trademarked in more than a hundred. There are
actually two spam cans in the permanent collection at the
(22:17):
Smithsonian and in the Division of the History of Technology.
One was the original ninety seven can, which had to
be opened using a key, and the other is a
more modern luncheon meat can which was introduced in nine
which I think has the poll tab style UH. And
the look of the label for spam has stayed basically
the same all this time. Spam was also served at
(22:41):
a breakfast at the opening of a World War Two
exhibition at the National Museum of American History, and the
circle back a little bit to Spam's manufacturer. Hormel is
still a majority owned by family, but it's no longer
really family run. Family still owns it, but other professionals
of running things are in charge of the company. I
also in this episode had a whole rather lengthy section
(23:04):
about labor history at the Hormail Company, which has some
actually very interesting twists and turns and contradictions. There were
parts of the company's history that were really revolutionary in
terms of labor relations, and then there are other parts
of the company's history in which there were really contentious
and heated strikes. And then in one case, uh, a
(23:26):
strange autoimmune disease that cropped up at one of its
meat suppliers. It's just the whole long series of things. Um.
And then as I you know, went through this outline
too edited, it all seemed extremely ancillary to the story
of spam. So I don't think we will have a
(23:46):
whole episode on the history of labor relations at the
Hormail Company. But if you are interested in such a thing,
I will put the links to my sources on that
in our show notes so you can check them out
for yourself. Uh I. UM. Most of of my research
for this sort of fell on either side of a weekend,
(24:06):
and on the friday part I kept being like, maybe
I should go get some spam and eat it, because
I don't I'm not sure I've ever eaten spam. I'm
sure I did at some point as a child. We
have it in our three Yeah, I know, I know
I've had should be fun toast, that's I know for sure. No,
but it is. It is another kind of military joke food.
(24:28):
We definitely have spam in our three day emergency kit,
you know, in case there's some kind of disaster. Uh
So that was sort of Friday, and then on Monday,
I had these resources that had all of these spam
recipes and I kept being like, that sounds disgusting. Like
the ones that were um, you know that the military
(24:49):
stew and the spam we stui Like that sounded really
interesting to me. But then there are ones that were
American feeds that were made with spam, and I was like,
that's the grossest thing that I've ever heard of. I'm
not throwing a shade to Spain a man. People have
put together to some gross sounding recipes. There are lots
of non spam gross recipes. Okay, one of them was
(25:09):
fake Escargo and I'm just gonna leave it. It's like
spam's Halloween costumes. I don't even know what that is. Yeah,
I like Escargo and the idea of using spam to
make uh fake escargo really grossed me out. It's a
little and um. On that note, I think I will
(25:29):
turn to some listener mail which is not about spam.
So this listener mail is from Sam. It is about
our Great Leap Forward episode. We are as we are
recording this, we're halfway through the publication of our mini
series on China under the helm of Chairman mal Zadong.
So this is UM from Sam on one of the
(25:50):
earlier episodes of the series. I'm a long time listener,
first time writer. I really enjoy your podcast. To thank
you for your work. I am a PhD student who
studies China, and I'm currently doing field work in China,
where podcasts such as yours have gotten me through countless
hours of data collection and travel between research sites. I
was very excited to see the mini series on China.
(26:12):
I just finished listening to the Greatly Forward GLF episode
and I figured I would write in to tell you
about one of the other significant legacies of the g
LF that you did not discuss. An extension of the topic,
if you will. During the GLF, China instituted the modern
form of its household registration system as a means of
actually implementing the planned economy. In order to collect agricultural
(26:37):
production from rural communes and distribute it successfully to urban communes,
the government had to find a way to identify who
lived where, in what type of commune, and to keep
them there so redistribution could be effective. Every individual received
a hu ko i actually I'm not sure if I'm
pronouncing that correctly, or registration status, which identified them by
(27:00):
a physical location and type of commune, urban or rural.
Because rural communes produced the food, they were generally not
a lotted specific ractions by the government, whereas urban commune
residents who worked in factories had to be provided with
food rations. After the g LF fell to pieces, the
other government institutions that were set up at this time
(27:20):
to support the planned economy were scrapped, such as rigid
one price systems for government collections, but household registration status remained.
Up until the nineteen eighties. People were not legally allowed
to move outside of their registration location, meaning that labor
mobility was practically non existent, but these restrictions were loosened
in the nineteen eighties and eventually abolished in the nineteen nineties.
(27:44):
One thing that hasn't really changed, however, is government allotment
of resources. While the government no longer divides out food rations,
they do provide social welfare in the place of food distribution.
Local governments began offering social welfare benefits, including free public education,
eligibility for maternity care and workers compensation, health insurance, and
pensions based on individuals registration status. Some services were reserved
(28:08):
for urban residents only, such as pensions. A rural person
could always rely on their land allowment to earn money
after retirement, and the services that were offered to both
were set up and managed through two different systems, with
urban systems better funded thanks separate but equal. These social
welfare differences remain to this day. The complicating factor is
(28:30):
that one's registration status is inherited. Your status generally follows
your mother, regardless of what type of work you do
or where you are physically located. Up until the nineteen nineties,
there were very few formal ways to change the status
you were born with, creating rigid inequalities. A common related
topic in Western news media is China's floating population or
(28:51):
migrant workers. Internal migrants registered far away from where their
registration status is and many who have rural status. For
these at the edules who moved to the coast to
gain employment, there's significant labor surplus in rural areas. They
generally have no option to access local welfare services such
as locally provided health insurance, public education for their children,
(29:14):
and pensions, making socio economic mobility difficult and hindering integration
of these two groups identified and separated during the time
of the Great Lead Forward. While the system is under
reform the subject of my dissertation research, there remains and
will remain for many generations, a significant yeah between those
who have access to government services and those who do not.
(29:36):
Just thought you might be interested in this other significant
legacy of the g LF SAM. Absolutely, yes, we are
interested in that legacy. Um. I think I mentioned UH
at the beginning of the whole Many series that there
was just no way to cover every aspect of it.
So I'm hugely happy that somebody spent the time to
explain that whole part of it, which not only is
(29:59):
something that we didn't talk about in the episodes, but
it is something that didn't even come up in the
particular sources that I was using UH for research at all.
So thank you so much. Sam. If you would like
to write to us, we're at history podcast that how
stuff Works dot com, or Facebook is Facebook dot com
slash missed in History, and our Twitter is missed in History.
Our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
(30:21):
or on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slat missed in History.
You can buy t shirts and phone cases and all
kinds of other stuff at our spreadshirt store, which is
at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. If you
would like to learn more about what we have talked
about today, you can come to our parent company's website
that is how stuff Works dot com, but the words
spam in the search bar, and in addition to finding
(30:42):
an article on email spam, you will find how Spam Works,
which talks all about the food and how it's made
and what's in it. You can also come to our website,
which is missing history dot com to find show notes
and an archive of every single episode and occasionally other
stuff that we decide to blog about. There you can
do all of that and so much more at how
stuff works dot com and missing history dot com for
(31:08):
more on this and thousands of other topics is it
how stuff works? Dot com, m
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, do you
remember recently on our Facebook page and we had that
weird influx of self published the book spam? Yeah, Like
(00:24):
suddenly just tons of posts were showing up of people
promoting their published books that often had nothing to do
with history. No, none of them, And that was the
only thing and they had in common was that none
of them were about history. Otherwise they were by different people,
they were posted from different accounts, they were in different genres.
It was very strange. And because I was wondering maybe,
(00:47):
you know, maybe there had been some article but had
gotten passed around that was like to promote your e
book post on random people's Facebook pages, I posted on
our Facebook page to say sort of, hey, listeners, any
of you how have any idea why this might be happening? Um.
A couple of people really went out of their way
to yell at us and call us idiots for even
(01:07):
asking that question. Most people kind of shrugged their shoulders
virtually about it. A few people gave us suggestions, who
are trying to like track down exactly what was going on,
but a couple of people said, you know, it would
be cool is if you did an episode about spam
the food. Not spam like the unwanted ecommunication, but spam
(01:30):
the food. And I can't get behind that because I
will loudly and proudly say I quite enjoy spam. Yeah.
Well uh, And immediately from just the few facts that
I already knew about spam's influence on various cuisines in
the wake of World War Two, I was like, yeah,
let's do that. That sounds actually pretty interesting and awesome.
(01:51):
And then that led to several other people chim chiming
in with interesting tidbits about spam and history. So that
is what we were talking about today. Thank you random
people who put their weird e books on our Facebook page.
It was a journey, but we got to a cool
episode idea. But I like sharing the journeys. Sometimes a
(02:11):
lot of times people ask us how we come up
with these things. Well that's an example. So yes, today
we were going to talk about spam's history and how
spam played a part in some pretty important historical events,
namely World War two and the Korean War, so in
case anyone does not know, spam is made by Hormel Foods.
(02:34):
George A. Hormel was born in eighteen sixty in Buffalo,
New York. Now, their last name was originally pronounced Hormal
to rhyme with normal, and it's not totally clear when
Hormel became Hormel Um because we've both been saying Hormel
all our lives, and for the sake of consistency, we're
just gonna go with Hormel. That was definitely what the
(02:55):
company was calling itself by the time spam was invented.
So the Hormel family moved to Toledo, Ohio when George
was just six, and he worked in his father's tannery
after school. The Panic of eighteen seventy three meant that
the family found itself meeting additional income, so at the
age of twelve, George left school so that he could
(03:17):
spend more time working and make more money for the family.
After a few brief stints and a couple of other jobs,
he wound up working at his uncle's meat packing business,
and he worked there until he was nineteen, and George
continued to work in different jobs Throughout his young adulthood.
He was working as a traveling salesman when he found
a meat shop for sale in Austin, Minnesota, where he
(03:39):
was passing through while he was doing some business in
his sales and he bought this meat shop and he
opened it, putting his experience at his uncle's meat packing
operation into practice and opening his own meat business. Soon
he really wanted the business to be more than just
a butcher's shop, so he borrowed some money, found an investor,
and ablished George A. Cormel and Company. The George was
(04:03):
just G. E O with period after it, and they
operated out of an abandoned creamery that was in and
at that point he was thirty one years old, all
of the United States biggest meat packing operations were in Chicago,
and here he was in Austin, Minnesota, hundreds of miles
away from that sort of nexus of industry. And he
was also brand new. He was a small business in
(04:26):
an industry that at that point was completely dominated by
really established, longtime powerhouses. And he also didn't actually have
some of the equipment that he was going to need
to be, uh, you know, a large scale meat packer.
For example, he did not have refrigerated railed cars at
his disposal. Those have been around since eighteen seventy eight,
(04:47):
but George did not have any until after the turn
of the century. So George Hormel needed to set himself
apart in some way. Since he couldn't just go head
to head with all these giant established meat packing companies,
he decided to focus on two things. The first was pork,
since more of the pig carcass was used than in
(05:07):
many other food animals, and quality, so when other businesses
were cutting their pork products with filt with fillers, he
really stuck as much as he could just to meet
that came from pigs and the company incorporated in nineteen
o one, and by nine four they were slaughtering a
million hogs each year. George Hormel's son Jay, He had
(05:30):
other sons as well, but Jay is the one who
plays a part in this part of the story. He
was a veteran of World War One, having served as
chief quartermaster in the American Expeditionary Forces. Jay came back
from the war with a sense of what canned goods
could do in terms of feeding an army, so he
encouraged Hormel to look into focusing on canned meat products.
(05:53):
The company's first canned ham came out in nineteen six.
In nineteen twenty nine, George Hormel retired and Jay took
at the Helm after his father was no longer part
of the business. And at this point Hormel introduced Didnty
Moore beef stew and Hormel Chili UH. Those both came
out in at about the same time. The Hormel Company
(06:15):
recognized that it had a surplus of shoulder meat from pigs. Now,
this wasn't a particularly popular cut of meat because neatly
removing the meat from the bone was a really time
and labor intensive process, and because a lot of consumers
thought that it was inferior to other cuts of pork,
like ham. And what the Hormel Company decided to do
(06:37):
was to grind up this shoulder meat along with some
ham and add salt, water, a bit of sugar, and
some sodium nitrate. That last ingredient preserves the color of
the meat and it also inhibits bacterial growth. Uh and
today's spam also includes potato starch, but that was not
in the original It was added later to keep the
liquid from seeping out of the meat and forming a
(06:58):
gelatinous layer on top, which I remember seeing periodically and
hands when I was a kid, and it was indeed
kind of gross. Yeah, that was in the eighties when
they made that change. Um. This new product's name was
coined by Kenneth Dagonau, who was not only a Broadway
actor but also the brother of a Hormel VP. He
(07:21):
won a hundred dollars for his efforts. It's allegedly a
portmanteau of spiced and ham, but the specifics on that
are really not documented, and Hormel claims that what it
really stands for is a closely guarded secret that makes
it sound like it's uh, somehow secretly spelling out horrible
(07:41):
things that could be contained in it. But the important
thing is that spam took the world by storm, and
we're going to talk about that after we have a
quick ad break. And now we'll get to spam and
how it came to dominate the market. Yeah. So spam
made its entry into the market in n seven and
its launch was accompanied by a huge advertising campaign, and
(08:03):
it builds spam is suitable for every meal and for snacks.
Spam was basically an instant hit, and it took eighteen
percent of the market share for canned ham in its
first year. That is hugely significant. The US was starting
to recover somewhat from the Great Depression, but overall, people
were really excited about having access to an inexpensive, shelf
stable source of meat. Plus it's really long shelf life
(08:26):
meant that you could stock up when you had extra
money and you would have like a nice little go
to in your pantry of edibles. Spam also got an
endorsement from George Burns and Gracie Allen on their radio
show There's a Charming Depending on Your Taste print ad
for both Spam and the show, in which George says
(08:47):
to Gracie, Gracie, if a strange man offered to buy
you lunch, what would you say? And then Gracie replies, spam.
I think it's charming, but it is pretty Basically everything
those two did was charming to me. Um. Also on
the print ad was the copy cold or Hot Spam
hits the spot Cold bits Spam and vegetable mold Spam
(09:10):
and salad sandwiches, Hot Spam and eggs, Spam and waffles,
Baked Spam, spam Burgers. A singing radio commercial also came
out in the forties that began and ended with the
words spam, spam, spam, spam, and to look at it,
as I did look at it many times since I
was doing research, it looks a lot like the Monty
(09:31):
Python sketch, but in reality it was sung to the
tune of My Body Lies over the Ocean. Now. I
just wish someone could convince Terry Jones to sing the
spam song in his family d voice to my Body
Lies over the Ocean. I bet we could. Would will
start a campaign. World War Two really launched spam into
(09:51):
the American patriotic consciousness. US residents were encouraged to give
up beef and premium cuts of other meats so that
they could help the war effort, and spam was a
handy alternative. Yeah. So, while people were eating spam out
of necessity towards the end of the Great Depression because
it was cheap and they didn't have a lot of money,
this time it was more of a sacrifice to support
(10:11):
the United States UM. The Hormel Company, along with other
meat producers, made specially packaged army versions of spam. These
were basically extremely large spam loaves and olive drab tins.
Then they weren't branded as spam with that distinctive blue
spam label. They contained some extra salt so that they
(10:32):
could withstand the temperature extremes of all the places that
the troops were deployed. Uh. There were also some ordinary
cans of spam that were basically bought in a pinch
to try to make ends meet for the men's rations.
Hormel wound up providing at least one hundred million pounds
of spam during World War Two. That's a lot of spam.
(10:55):
It's so much spam. It's a running theme in World
War two soldiers discussions of the war and for the troops.
The word spam actually came to mean any kind of
processed and preserved meat, and it was on the menu
a lot. It's often seemed like it was three meals,
three meals a day, every single day. So spam three
meals a day didn't literally need mean brand name spam,
(11:17):
but processed meat three meals a day. Yeah, People basically
thought of all of that stuff as spam. It's similar
to how all tissues are Kleenex, and that is the
thing that Hormil tries so hard to come back. In
nineteen sixty six, when the Hormail company was celebrating its
seventy five birthdays, why D. Eisenhower wrote in a letter
(11:39):
to a retired Hormil president saying, quote, I ate my
share of spam, along with millions of other soldiers. I'll
even confess to a few unkind remarks about it. Uttered
during the strain of battle, you understand, But as former
commander in chief, I believe I can still forgive you
for your only sin sending us so much of it.
(12:02):
That's so much of it meant that a lot of
servicemen swore they would never touch another can of spam
once the war was over. And while this may have
been true at least temporarily, many people who had sworn
never to touch another piece of spam wound up feeling
a little nostalgic for it once the war was over.
Eating spam took on this patriotic air, and it was
bolstered this concept of patriotism linked to spam by Hormel's
(12:26):
advertising campaign, which tied spam to wholesome values and patriotic spirit,
and that advertising plan went on throughout the fifties. It
was also bolstered by a sixty member dance troup known
as the Hormel Girls, who toured around in USO fashion
after the end of the war after getting their start
in n I hope we have pictures of those I
(12:49):
saw a couple. I did not find any that we
can like put in our blog or anything. There are
some that could be a great Halloween costume. The company
sation of nostalgian patriotism meant that spams Heyday in the
US really ran through the fifties and the sixties. Cookbooks
featured spam is an ingredient in all kinds of dishes,
(13:11):
but as the seventies crept in, spam's popularity started to
fade a bit. On December fifteenth, nineteen seventy the last
skit on that night's episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus
was the infamous Spam sketch, in which a couple goes
to a cafe where they're serving a lot of spam,
(13:31):
and then there are vikings who also sing about spam. Then,
on December thirty one, nineteen seventy four, episode of mash
Hawkeye and Trapp or John Save Radar's Pet lamb for
being slaughtered for a feast by sculpting a new one
out of spam. Weird Al Yankovic's Spam song sung to
the tune of Our E m Stand came out in nine,
(13:52):
at which point the can meat had really become cemented
in the American consciousness as both a joke and junk food.
People started to think of spam as mystery meat made
of remnants, the way that hot dogs are reported to be,
even though its ingredients had not changed. Aside from that
addition of potatoes starts that we talked about earlier, and
today people really kind of think of spam as dated
(14:15):
and cheap, at least most people, yeah, in the United States.
This is not the case in several other parts of
the world. So to talk about spam in other parts
of the world, we need to zip back to World
War to you for a minute. In the United States,
the Lend Lease Act was passed on March eleventh, ninety one,
(14:35):
and as its name suggests, the Lend Lease Act allowed
the United States to lend or lease supplies and materials
to Allied nations without payment if doing so was quote
vital to the defense of the United States. So this
was a way for the United States to help the
war effort without actually committing troops, which would happen eventually
(14:56):
after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December seven
of the same year. Through the Lend Lease Act, spam
made its way to Russia. In Nikita Kushchev's memoir, speaking
of World War Two, he says, quote, there were many
jokes going around in the army, some of them off
color about American spam, but it tasted good. Nonetheless, without spam,
(15:17):
we wouldn't have been able to feed our army. Spam
also made its way to several other parts of the
world through the Lend Lease Act and through the presence
of American troops during the war, along with other military actions.
So we're going to talk specifically about Hawaii, which at
this point was not yet a state, as well as
the Philippines and South Korea. And in Hawaii, spam's influence
(15:40):
came from two sources. One was the American g i
s who were stationed there or who passed through Hawaii
on their way to other parts of the Pacific. The
other was Hawaii's Japanese population. So during World War two,
in the continental United States, the government forced many Japanese
Americans into internment camps. This is absolutely a thing that
(16:01):
is on the list for podcast episode later on. UM
consequently spam sometimes because it makes an appearance in Japanese
American food because it was one of the foods that
was being served in the camps. But Hawaii was not
yet a state, so the United States government could not
really begin interning its citizens. I mean, you could make
(16:23):
an argument that the United States government shouldn't have been
interning its citizens without due process in the first place.
It's super did not have that authority to do in Hawaii. Also,
the Japanese population of Hawaii was just too big to
be interned. There were way too many people of Japanese ancestry.
The camps that would have been required were too large
(16:45):
for the islands themselves to be able to support. There
was just no way that the United States could do
in Hawaii what it was doing in the continental United States. Instead,
to combat this perceived threat from people with Japanese ancestry,
restrictions were placed on the movements and activities of people
(17:06):
that were of Japanese descent in Hawaii. So Japanese Hawaiians
were banned from deep sea fishing, which had been one
of the ways that they primarily source their food for
the Japanese community. Because of Hawaii's remote location, it's landscape
and the available food sources, the easiest protein source for
Japanese Hawaiians to use to replace what they've lost from
(17:28):
deep sea fishing was spam. Consequently, spam has been incorporated
into many Japanese dishes, and these very based on different
ethnic groups who live in Japan, but in particular there's
a lot of sort of Hawaiian Japanese spam fusion. There's
a Yummy restaurant here in Atlanta that does a yummy
um spam entrede with gravy and deliciousness, and I absolutely
(17:53):
love it. Uh. The most famous example of the spam
dishes that they were making at this time is spam musubi,
which is spam over rice. It's wrapped in nori seaweed,
and it's sometimes erroneously called spam sushi. It does kind
of resemble a sushi role, but musubi is its more
accurate name. Today. Hawaii is, of course a state and
(18:16):
consumes more spam than any other state, and the island
of Waikiki hosts an annual spam jam Let's go um.
Thanks to the presence of g I s during World
War Two and an ongoing military presence thereafter, spam also
became very popular in Guam and Okinawa. In Korea and Japan,
(18:38):
citizens were really just desperately suffering during World War Two.
As a side note, if you have not seen the
Japanese film Grave of the Fireflies, this will give you
an idea of how desperately hard things were for Japanese
citizens during the war. Canned meats like spam really saved
people's lives and consequently became incorporated into local cuisines there
(19:01):
as well. In South Korea, this continued during the Korean War.
American soldiers station they're not considering spam to be particularly
valuable or important. We're happy to use it as trade
and to increase goodwill, and they would also sell it
on the black market later on and during the Korean War,
the United States Army's Postal Exchange or p X was
(19:24):
often the only place that people could get meat. Spam
was really what was available, and since people couldn't afford
to buy it necessarily from the p X, it really
came to be considered a luxury um. It's an ingredient
in a dish called boud aid gay, which I hope
I am pronouncing correctly, which is also called military stew,
(19:44):
and that's basically a thick stew that also includes Korean
ingredients like kimchi. A fried slab of pork called pew
yuck was also part of Korean cuisine before the introduction
of spam, and spam became a replacement for pork in
that dish when people couldn't get ahold of regular pork.
So spam is undoubtedly an economy class food in the
(20:06):
United States, but it's a little more expensive in Korea,
and this association with scarcity and expense from earlier times
means that today it's frequently given as a really high
class gift. Often this is part of a really elaborate
gift box that includes other foods. Korea is consequently the
world's second largest consumer of spam after the United States,
(20:29):
and spam similarly became popular in the Philippines as an
after effect of U S military presence. Today in the Philippines,
it's often purchased outside of the country by people who
are traveling for pleasure or business, and then brought home
with them as traditional homecoming gifts. Uh. This means a
lot of times if you're in duty free shops at
(20:50):
airports that cater to a lot of Filipino travelers, there
will be spam in the duty free shop. And spam
is treated in the Philippines on both the black and
the gray markets. And there are actually nine different legitimately
available varieties of spam there. There's even a Turkey version
for the nation's Muslim population. I wonder what that tastes like.
I also wonder what that tastes like. Um. The reason
(21:12):
that there are is a black market at a grain
market for spam is that there are some restrictions on
imports in Philippines, which means there's more demand for spam
than is actually allowed to be imported. Um. And when
when you look at the numbers of the number of
cans sold versus the number of people allowed to sell it,
it just doesn't add up. There is additional spam coming
(21:36):
from somewhere. So there's a legitimate argument to be made
here that all of these examples are examples of undo
American influence on other cultures. But in the case of
spam in particular, local cuisines have really taken spam and
then absorbed it and made it into something that is
(21:56):
uniquely their own, whereas in the United States people were
usually basically using spam as a substitute for other meat
rather than making something new and uniquely spam out of it.
And today's spam is distributed in more than fifty countries
and it's trademarked in more than a hundred. There are
actually two spam cans in the permanent collection at the
(22:17):
Smithsonian and in the Division of the History of Technology.
One was the original ninety seven can, which had to
be opened using a key, and the other is a
more modern luncheon meat can which was introduced in nine
which I think has the poll tab style UH. And
the look of the label for spam has stayed basically
the same all this time. Spam was also served at
(22:41):
a breakfast at the opening of a World War Two
exhibition at the National Museum of American History, and the
circle back a little bit to Spam's manufacturer. Hormel is
still a majority owned by family, but it's no longer
really family run. Family still owns it, but other professionals
of running things are in charge of the company. I
also in this episode had a whole rather lengthy section
(23:04):
about labor history at the Hormail Company, which has some
actually very interesting twists and turns and contradictions. There were
parts of the company's history that were really revolutionary in
terms of labor relations, and then there are other parts
of the company's history in which there were really contentious
and heated strikes. And then in one case, uh, a
(23:26):
strange autoimmune disease that cropped up at one of its
meat suppliers. It's just the whole long series of things. Um.
And then as I you know, went through this outline
too edited, it all seemed extremely ancillary to the story
of spam. So I don't think we will have a
(23:46):
whole episode on the history of labor relations at the
Hormail Company. But if you are interested in such a thing,
I will put the links to my sources on that
in our show notes so you can check them out
for yourself. Uh I. UM. Most of of my research
for this sort of fell on either side of a weekend,
(24:06):
and on the friday part I kept being like, maybe
I should go get some spam and eat it, because
I don't I'm not sure I've ever eaten spam. I'm
sure I did at some point as a child. We
have it in our three Yeah, I know, I know
I've had should be fun toast, that's I know for sure. No,
but it is. It is another kind of military joke food.
(24:28):
We definitely have spam in our three day emergency kit,
you know, in case there's some kind of disaster. Uh
So that was sort of Friday, and then on Monday,
I had these resources that had all of these spam
recipes and I kept being like, that sounds disgusting. Like
the ones that were um, you know that the military
(24:49):
stew and the spam we stui Like that sounded really
interesting to me. But then there are ones that were
American feeds that were made with spam, and I was like,
that's the grossest thing that I've ever heard of. I'm
not throwing a shade to Spain a man. People have
put together to some gross sounding recipes. There are lots
of non spam gross recipes. Okay, one of them was
(25:09):
fake Escargo and I'm just gonna leave it. It's like
spam's Halloween costumes. I don't even know what that is. Yeah,
I like Escargo and the idea of using spam to
make uh fake escargo really grossed me out. It's a
little and um. On that note, I think I will
(25:29):
turn to some listener mail which is not about spam.
So this listener mail is from Sam. It is about
our Great Leap Forward episode. We are as we are
recording this, we're halfway through the publication of our mini
series on China under the helm of Chairman mal Zadong.
So this is UM from Sam on one of the
(25:50):
earlier episodes of the series. I'm a long time listener,
first time writer. I really enjoy your podcast. To thank
you for your work. I am a PhD student who
studies China, and I'm currently doing field work in China,
where podcasts such as yours have gotten me through countless
hours of data collection and travel between research sites. I
was very excited to see the mini series on China.
(26:12):
I just finished listening to the Greatly Forward GLF episode
and I figured I would write in to tell you
about one of the other significant legacies of the g
LF that you did not discuss. An extension of the topic,
if you will. During the GLF, China instituted the modern
form of its household registration system as a means of
actually implementing the planned economy. In order to collect agricultural
(26:37):
production from rural communes and distribute it successfully to urban communes,
the government had to find a way to identify who
lived where, in what type of commune, and to keep
them there so redistribution could be effective. Every individual received
a hu ko i actually I'm not sure if I'm
pronouncing that correctly, or registration status, which identified them by
(27:00):
a physical location and type of commune, urban or rural.
Because rural communes produced the food, they were generally not
a lotted specific ractions by the government, whereas urban commune
residents who worked in factories had to be provided with
food rations. After the g LF fell to pieces, the
other government institutions that were set up at this time
(27:20):
to support the planned economy were scrapped, such as rigid
one price systems for government collections, but household registration status remained.
Up until the nineteen eighties. People were not legally allowed
to move outside of their registration location, meaning that labor
mobility was practically non existent, but these restrictions were loosened
in the nineteen eighties and eventually abolished in the nineteen nineties.
(27:44):
One thing that hasn't really changed, however, is government allotment
of resources. While the government no longer divides out food rations,
they do provide social welfare in the place of food distribution.
Local governments began offering social welfare benefits, including free public education,
eligibility for maternity care and workers compensation, health insurance, and
pensions based on individuals registration status. Some services were reserved
(28:08):
for urban residents only, such as pensions. A rural person
could always rely on their land allowment to earn money
after retirement, and the services that were offered to both
were set up and managed through two different systems, with
urban systems better funded thanks separate but equal. These social
welfare differences remain to this day. The complicating factor is
(28:30):
that one's registration status is inherited. Your status generally follows
your mother, regardless of what type of work you do
or where you are physically located. Up until the nineteen nineties,
there were very few formal ways to change the status
you were born with, creating rigid inequalities. A common related
topic in Western news media is China's floating population or
(28:51):
migrant workers. Internal migrants registered far away from where their
registration status is and many who have rural status. For
these at the edules who moved to the coast to
gain employment, there's significant labor surplus in rural areas. They
generally have no option to access local welfare services such
as locally provided health insurance, public education for their children,
(29:14):
and pensions, making socio economic mobility difficult and hindering integration
of these two groups identified and separated during the time
of the Great Lead Forward. While the system is under
reform the subject of my dissertation research, there remains and
will remain for many generations, a significant yeah between those
who have access to government services and those who do not.
(29:36):
Just thought you might be interested in this other significant
legacy of the g LF SAM. Absolutely, yes, we are
interested in that legacy. Um. I think I mentioned UH
at the beginning of the whole Many series that there
was just no way to cover every aspect of it.
So I'm hugely happy that somebody spent the time to
explain that whole part of it, which not only is
(29:59):
something that we didn't talk about in the episodes, but
it is something that didn't even come up in the
particular sources that I was using UH for research at all.
So thank you so much. Sam. If you would like
to write to us, we're at history podcast that how
stuff Works dot com, or Facebook is Facebook dot com
slash missed in History, and our Twitter is missed in History.
Our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
(30:21):
or on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slat missed in History.
You can buy t shirts and phone cases and all
kinds of other stuff at our spreadshirt store, which is
at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. If you
would like to learn more about what we have talked
about today, you can come to our parent company's website
that is how stuff Works dot com, but the words
spam in the search bar, and in addition to finding
(30:42):
an article on email spam, you will find how Spam Works,
which talks all about the food and how it's made
and what's in it. You can also come to our website,
which is missing history dot com to find show notes
and an archive of every single episode and occasionally other
stuff that we decide to blog about. There you can
do all of that and so much more at how
stuff works dot com and missing history dot com for
(31:08):
more on this and thousands of other topics is it
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.