Thursday, September 06, 2012

The Best Thing to come out of Minnesota!

Yes, it's the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota.  Some neat things about the area;

1.  The SPAM Museum is only about a mile from the Hormel Institute for medical research.  I resisted the urge to go in and ask whether it was intended to deal with the effects of eating too much fatty pork!

2.  It's actually a fairly interesting summary of the history of the Hormel company as it changed from a small butcher of hogs into one of the world's largest meatpackers.

3.  My favorite advertisement is where the man of the house notes that a bowl of "Dinty Moore Beef Stew" was the best meal he'd had in ages.  If I said that to my wife, she'd still be crying, and I'd be learning how to make Tima let me use her doghouse.

4.  I was actually pretty sad to see the change of Hormel from maker of exquisite sausages and bacons to mass market purveyor of potted meat.

5.  The current product offerings pay some homage to the past, but the plethora of flavors of "SPAM" suggest that more and more, people don't know how to use a cookbook or spices.

6.  The videos of the plant in action are thoroughly depressing--the world has scarcely seen that much gray since Lee marched into Pennsylvania.

All in all, worth a visit (admission is free), but depressing in a way as it also shows some thoroughly depressing changes in our diets and lifestyles since 1937.  At least it's depressing until the last exhibit, which is a mock-up of the Viking cafe from Monty Python.



Wait, one thing was sadly missing.  Here we go:



3 comments:

Gino said...

ok, on the list for my next visit to MN (tentively scheduled for this coming July).
spam lover, yes i am. how can i pass this up?

Jim Peet said...

We visited the museum. I had Kathee buy some for breakfast the following Sat. Not my taste. But HRL is a nice dividend stock

Bike Bubba said...

Jim--we actually found out that the way you treat the stuff is to fry it well, and a ginger sauce (e.g. the spam musubi) really cuts the fattiness. I tried a ginger-orange sauce with SPAM and peppers over chow mein (pan fried noodle), and it was surprisingly good. And colorful.

Gino; I bet ya can't wait. Come on back now, ya hear!