The deep, dark truth about Spam.
Also some nifty trivia.
Impress your friends and relatives!

Ingredients:
Chopped pork shoulder meat with ham meat added.
Salt (for binding, flavour, and firmness)
Water (to help in mixing)
Sugar (for flavour)
Sodium Nitrite (for colour and as a preservative)
Yum yum!

Nutrition Information For SPAM (original style):
Calories Per Serving: 170
Calories Per Serving From Fat: 140
Serving Size: 2 oz.
Servings Per Container: 6 (large) or 3.5 (small)
Total Fat: 16g
Saturated Fat: 6g
Cholesterol: 40mg
Sodium: 750mg
Total Carbohydrates: 0g
Fiber: 0g
Sugars: 0g
Proteins: 7g
Vitamin A: 0%
Vitamin C: 0%
Calcium: 0%
Iron: 2%
Deee-licious!

Nifty Spam Trivia!

By World War II, Hormel had sold twenty thousand tons of Spam. Then, during the wartime meat rationing, Spam got popular...
If all the cans of Spam ever eaten were put end-to-end, they would circle the globe at least ten times.
In the U.S. alone, 3.8 cans of Spam "are consumed every second"(assuming SPAM is eaten 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year).
Senator Robert Byrd of West Viginia eats a sandwich of SPAM and mayonnaise on white bread three times a week.
Residents of Hawai eat an average of four cans of SPAM per person per year, more than in any other place on Earth (Elsewhere in the Universe, who knows?).
By 1959, a billion cans of SPAM had been sold. The two billion mark was hit in 1970, followed by three billion in 1980, four billion in 1986, and five billion in 1993. That's a lot of SPAM!
In Korea, SPAM is sold in stylish presentation gift boxes of nine cans each. SPAM stolen from army PXs can be found on the Korean black market. And there are Korean imitations called Lo-Spam, Dak, Plumrose, and Tulip, to ensure that no one need go without.
Nikita Krushchev once credited SPAM with the survival of the WWII Russian army. ''Without SPAM, we wouldn't have been able to feed our army,'' he said.
SPAM is sold in over 99% of U.S. grocery stores.
The SPAM luncheon meat trademark is registered in 93 countries.
Over 60 million people in the U.S. eat SPAM.
SPAM is made in two U.S. locations - Austin, Minnesota, and Fremont, Nebraska - and seven other countries: England, Australia, Denmark, Phillipines, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
1989, the U.S. armed forces bought 3.3 million pounds of SPAM.
Over 141 million cans of SPAM are sold worldwide each year. Isn't that amazing?
I t's all true!

 

From the Los Angeles Times
Hormel Sues SpamArrest Over Name

By Marisa Lagos
Times Staff Writer

July 30, 2003, 3:51 PM PDT
It's a case of Spam vs. spam.

Yes, it's hard to confuse the trademark canned meat with junk e-mail. But Hormel Foods Corp thinks otherwise.

Hormel, which owns the canned meat SPAM, has taken issue with SpamArrest's request to trademark their name.

The Seattle-based software and internet company, whose product blocks unwanted or "junk" e-mails for subscribers, filed for two international trademarks in early 2002. This year, the Austin, Minn.-based food producer—which has marketed SPAM since its creation 66 years ago — filed suit with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to stop the trademark's approval.

Hormel's claim: The trademark of those four letters belongs to them, and them alone, and they don't want people thinking of junk mail every time they see a can of their meat.

If you ask the internet company, though, the little blue can was the "last thing" on its mind when the name was decided in 2001.

"There's no possible way that a computer program to stop junk e-mail could be in any way confused with a canned meat product," SpamArrest spokesperson Allen Priaulx said. "Everyone in the world considers junk e-mail spam— it's a ubiquitous term. So we called the company SpamArrest."

Hormel's official position on spam as a word? The company does not object to the use of the "slang" term, the website said, but draws the line when it comes to trade-marking that name. "Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, 'Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?' " the statement said.

"We understand — we don't like junk e-mail either, and we understand that spam has become a term generic in use," Hormel spokesperson Julie Craven said. "But we have an obligation to step in when it's filed as a trademark."

According to Craven, the term became synonymous with virtual junk mail in the early 1990s, based on a Monty Python skit that featured the SPAM meat product.

"In this skit, a group of Vikings sang a chorus of 'spam, spam, spam . . .' in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation," according to the statement on http://www.spam.com. "Hence, the analogy applied because [unsolicited commercial e-mail] was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet."

But SpamArrest is only one of over 60 companies registered for a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with the word "Spam" in its name; over half of those requests are still pending and many of the others have been dropped or denied.

Priaulx says he doesn't understand why the meat company is coming after SpamArrest.

"I have no idea why, since we're the good guys," he said. "Nobody likes spam. It's a huge issue, especially for families. It's very difficult for parents to explain to their sons or daughters why they don't need a penis enlarger or breast implants."

Craven said as far as she knows, Hormel challenges every company that tries to trademark a name with "spam" in its title. She said the company has been successful in every challenge so far, which she said was at least a dozen.

"There's nothing new or different here," she said.

Mark Krull, a patent attorney in Bend, Oregon, said companies like Hormel fear infringement on their trademark for two reasons: one, the power of their name could become "diluted" by too much use; two, if the name becomes widely used for a particular type of product — like aspirin did — it could become generic and lose the trademark.

"If a name becomes truly generic, anyone can use it, and that's a problem," he said. "How can you continue to identify a product if they're all referred to by the same name?"

And while the general public may continue to use the word "spam" to refer to junk mail, if Hormel can remain the only company who has a trademark on "spam," they are more likely to retain the legal rights in the long run, Krull said.

Priaulx said SpamArrest is "pretty confident" that when the challenge goes before the U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, possibly as soon as this fall, the trademark will "zip right through."

Hormel, meanwhile, is sure its lunchmeat will remain the one and only "spam" with a trademark.