The Spam Museum: All Things Pork Shoulder

Austin, Minnesota is the home of Hormel Foods, and therefore the home of Spam, and therefore the home of the Spam Museum, which is exactly what it sounds like and more earnest about it than you might expect. The museum first opened in its Spam-focused form in two thousand one, now fills a fourteen-thousand-square-foot space downtown, and is free to enter. Its exhibits cover the full arc of the product: Jay Hormel's nineteen thirty-seven invention of the canned spiced pork shoulder as a Depression-era shelf-stable protein, the one hundred fifty million pounds of Spam the United States government bought to feed troops during World War Two, and the product's improbable afterlife as a culinary staple in Hawaii, South Korea, the Philippines, and dozens of other countries. The World War Two exhibit includes a recreation of the military rations experience, and it nods to the soldiers who grew so tired of Spam that some wrote to Jay Hormel to complain about having it at every meal.