Miracles From A Tin Can
The 1942 SPAM Can
Sunday, December 6, 2020
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SPAM changed my life. No, really. When I was seven years old.
Yes, the processed meat product. No, this is not hyperbole. Without SPAM, I wouldn’t be who I am today in some fundamental ways.
But it is someone else’s story that did the changing.
Before I tell you those interwoven tales, let’s enjoy the ‘fun’ of SPAM’s ingredients and daily allowances list. Trust me, it’s important later on:
[Number of servings per container: 6 - 2 oz each serving]
Per Serving:
Calories: 180
Total Fat: 16g (21% Daily Value)
Sat Fat: 6g (30% DV)
Trans Fat: 0g
Cholest: 40mg (13% DV)
Sodium: 790mg (34% DV)
Total Carb: 1g
Dietary Fiber: 0
Total Sugars: 1g
Protein: 7g
Vitamin D: 0% Calcium: 0% Iron: 2% Potassium: 2%
That’s right. One full can of SPAM will crush nearly 1100 calories from your day, dose you with 126% of your daily value in fat (180% of your saturated fat), 78% of your DV in cholesterol, 204% of your sodium DV, and 42 grams of protein.
Yikes, right? It’s a complete Gut Bomb. For the weak of heart, it ain’t. Literally.
I can see your nose crinkle in disgust from here (but, if you’re from Hawaii, I can see your mouth watering because all da tings I listed just no mattah, yeah, brah?). Most of us would rather get all those dosages in lesser amounts and from a wider variety of foods that are actually, you know, healthy. Many of us spurn canned / processed food for fresh, want our meats grass-fed as opposed to pulverized into a pressed loaf of something that makes a weird sucking sound when it drops out of the can, or have figured out ways to just avoid meat entirely for either health or ethical reasons or both. Most of us are probably D) some mixture of the above, though maybe not including SPAM if it’s flavor doesn’t fancy.
Simply put, no matter how we feel about it for whatever reason, SPAM is far from a necessity in any situation.
Or is it?
Okay, with that context established, now for the story that changed my life.
Because I lived on the Big Island in my formative years, I have almost always had a taste for SPAM and still enjoy the occasional Hawaiian breakfast of SPAM fried up with scrambled eggs, white rice, and shoyu (it’s also why I can get away with my little experiment in pidgin above – I grew up within it and spoke it. So there.). This meal is so popular in Hawaii that it is served at McDonald’s. No lie.
Notice I said ‘almost always’ had a taste for it. I only really started to like SPAM after this fateful day. Prior to that, I couldn’t really stand it….
Because we ate it multiple times a week.
I’m the son of a pastor and a (at the time) church pre-school teacher, so we did not have a great deal of money – at all. In retrospect, my parents did an impressive job of stretching it so my sister and I had all we needed and, more regularly than other kids I knew, what we wanted, too – fun sugared cereals, or a toy we just had to have, or a trip we wanted to take. Since the majority of foodstuffs in Hawaii have to be imported from across oceans, food there is expensive. So the challenge for my parents was even more acute that way.
This meant we had to often eat similar meals every week. One of those was SPAM fried up with cabbage, rice, and shoyu. It was easy and cheap to make, and it certainly was filling. But for a seven-year-old kid with no sense of context (there’s that word again….), SPAM and Cabbage and Rice Lunch was a letdown worthy of a Level Five Whine.
Until that particular Sunday. After that, I never whined about SPAM again.
Our house was on the same property as the church – known as a “parsonage.” Going from home to morning services on Sundays took minutes. And on this particular Sunday, I arrived at the church with my dad to find two strangers waiting for him.
One was an older blind woman, the other her son. He spoke English, but his mother only knew her native tongue – Russian. They were both kind to the point of deference, and they asked my father if they could speak to the congregation that morning about something very important.
I stood there as my father talked with them, really intimidated by the old woman. She was stooped and remarkably wrinkly to my young eyes, and she wore no sunglasses to hide her blindness, so that was an alarming sight to me. Her stringy grey hair was wrapped up in a weathered and torn headscarf, and she leaned on a cane that looked as old as she was – ancient, at least to my sensibilities. As she talked and her son translated for my dad, I was struck by how Russian (the first time I’d heard the language) sounded like someone playing an English-language record backwards.
Because they seemed so strange to me, I didn’t like them far more than I was curious about them. Such was my reaction to many things as a kid – if it was new and “weird,” it was more threatening than it was interesting.
The two of them were both political exiles from the Soviet Union, having been kicked out for distributing religious materials – all illegal under that regime. Still committed to their cause, they had somehow traveled to Hawaii and were going from church to church asking for donations to use to smuggle religious materials back into their country. I don’t remember if my dad had his doubts about the truth of their story or how long it took them to convince him, but in the end he agreed to give them a few minutes at the beginning of the service to speak…
…and he invited them to lunch at our house afterwards. I didn’t like that at all, because 1) I was intimidated by them and didn’t want them in my house, and 2) I knew them coming over would likely mean my mom would whip up an easy lunch for me and my sister while putting together something nicer for our guests. That way, my sister and I could then go run off and be kids while my parents played host for however long that required.
So that meant I was having SPAM and Cabbage and Rice for lunch. Again.
Damn it.
I didn’t say it, but I sure as hell (sorry, it’s Sunday – heck) thought it.
When services were over and their pitches had been made and monies collected, the mother and her son – let’s call them “Galina” and “Sacha” respectively, since I don’t remember their real names – arrived at the parsonage back door and I let them in. They were friendly and appreciative for the time at church and for the meal, and while my mom got both sets of lunches prepped, my dad sat with them in the living room off the kitchen to talk. My sister and I sat at the kitchen counter awaiting our fate - I mean lunch.
The hiss of the slices of SPAM hitting the frying pan is what started it all.
As the telltale aroma of SPAM wafted past me into the living room, Galina suddenly became quite animated, startling her son who was in deep conversation with my dad. She sat up straight in her chair and began to say a short phrase over and over. I remember the sight vividly even today – her wildly reaching for her cane and then slowly standing, turning towards the kitchen as she repeated the phrase. I sat transfixed and more than a little frightened.
Sacha and my father were as alarmed as they were surprised. Standing to steady his mother, Sacha pleaded with her in Russian as she moved closer to the kitchen. He finally shrugged and turned to my dad and said,
“All she is saying is ‘I smell Miracle Meat.’”
None of us, including Sacha, had heard that term before, but it was obvious that Galina meant the SPAM.
“Miracle Meat?”
My entire family – and Sacha – had the same reaction. My mom, though, stepped into action by handing me a small plate with several pieces of cooked SPAM on it and told me to take it to Galina. By this point, I was too bewildered to be scared, so I did as I was told. Sacha, doing his best to calm Galina, explained to her what was happening. Galina smiled then – she had very few teeth anymore – and put her hand out into the air, reaching for me.
That unnerved me, so I ended up taking a piece of SPAM off the plate and handing it to her. Then she did the weirdest thing – she sniffed it as she rubbed her fingers all over it, feeling it’s texture. Only after several seconds of that did she finally take an awkward bite.
I don’t know what appeared faster – the smile on her face or the tears in her milky white eyes. Whichever it was, Galina didn’t say another word for a few minutes. She took her time chewing, and before she’d swallowed the first piece, she already had reached out for another, which I provided. The same process happened several more times until the plate was empty. Galina asked for more – crying and smiling the whole time – and Mom was ready with more SPAM and some Kleenexes for her.
The second plate in hand, Galina finally gave in to Sacha’s ministrations and sat back down in the living room. I didn’t understand their language, but I could tell Sacha was asking Galina if she was alright and what was happening. I heard the “miracle meat” phrase again from him, and this time she put a hand on his and spoke calmly. He turned to the four of us.
“She says she will tell us the story.”
We all sat down – me on the floor of the living room – as Galina began to talk, tears streaming even as she spoke calmly, recounting a story that was probably too horrible for a seven-year-old to know, but one that changed me nonetheless from that day forward. Galina said it happened in her hometown in the Soviet Union, a place I had never heard of before.
Leningrad.
Specifically, Leningrad in 1944. The tail end of the Second World War. As I learned that day and then studied in depth years later, Galina was a survivor of one of the worst sieges in human history.
Some quick, overly generalized context – on September 8, 1941, German troops of Army Group North, along with their Finnish allies, completed an encirclement of the Soviet Union’s second largest city, known previously as St. Petersburg and Petrograd after its founder, Peter the Great. The city was the primary goal of the northernmost thrust of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which had begun the previous June. By the time Army Group North reached Leningrad, Hitler and his generals had decided it would be far more efficient and less costly to put the city under siege until it surrendered, rather than pound through the ferocious defenses the Soviets had established to protect “Lenin’s city.” So German armies cut off all the roads leading into the city, effectively ending the supply of food, fuels, medicine, and other materials needed to keep a city of several million people alive. To make things even more difficult for Galina and her fellow Leningraders, the Germans shelled the city every day randomly, killing civilians who were slowly starving to death.
Many in Hitler’s command, and around the world, figured it was only a matter of time before the city collapsed.
It never did.
On January 27, 1944 – two years, four months, two weeks, and five days after it began – the German siege collapsed as the resurgent Soviet Red Army drove the Germans back towards their homeland.
That’s 872 days. And the city never surrendered.
But it had suffered horribly. Though estimates vary, it is generally accepted that 800,000 people died in Leningrad during the siege, out of the estimated 2.5 million people that had been trapped in the city when the Germans cut off all escape routes. To put that number in further context, 800,000 dead is roughly equal to the total number of combined British and American fatalities suffered in the entire Second World War. If that is still too obscure to visualize, take an American football stadium like at the University of Michigan or Notre Dame – each one holds roughly 100,000 people - and multiply that by eight.
Eight full football stadiums. Take a minute and let that sink in.
Galina and the other survivors had endured hell on earth, particularly in the first winter months of the siege, when an estimated 100,000 people died every month of starvation. In the darkest days, some resorted to cannibalism once all the city’s pets, birds, rats, zoo animals, leaves, tree bark, wallpaper, shoe leather, glue, and paper had been consumed. During the winter months starting in late 1942, when nearby Lake Lagoda would freeze over and allow for temporary roads and bridges to be built, Soviet military forces would truck in as many supplies as possible to the city, under constant attack. Many of those supplies – especially food, medicine, warm clothing, light bulbs, shoes, soap, and spare machinery parts – came from the United States, part of the massive “Lend-Lease” program that supplied the Soviet Union and Great Britain with so much of what they desperately needed to stave off the Nazi onslaught. When the siege finally lifted in 1944, those same Lend-Lease supplies poured unfettered in massive quantities into Leningrad alongside liberating Soviet troops.
And, as Galina told us over her constant stream of tears, the one thing all Leningraders wanted to get their hands on from those supply deliveries was what they all came to call “Miracle Meat.”
SPAM. F*#%ing SPAM.
The answer to “why?” is easy – look back at the ingredients list again (and remember your initial reaction to it. Anything different now?)
For a city that had been starving for dozens of months, one can of SPAM could indeed produce miracles. No other foodstuff could deliver the vital nutrients – particularly fat, protein, and sodium – in the amounts that hundreds of thousands of people needed to survive first, then slowly recover from the deprivations of the siege. The very things that we, in our context, run away from when it comes to SPAM, are the same things that had Leningraders like Galina literally running towards it - fighting each other if necessary as supply trucks unloaded pallets of SPAM cans into the middle of boulevards all over the city.
The value of Miracle Meat went beyond its contents. The tin can itself could save lives. Holding it over a candle with the meat inside could turn those twelve ounces of what most of us call “eeeeewww” into a vitally needed hot meal; fill the empty can with water and it could be boiled for sterilizing old bandages or rudimentary surgical instruments and tools; heating the can was an easy way to warm hands or feet if it was then wrapped in a sock or cloth, helping prevent frostbite and hypothermia; its peel-back tin top could be reshaped into a spoon, knife, or other tool; and in winter, the cans could be filled with perishable items, covered in hardened wax and kept outside in the snow or ice so food could be preserved for basic rationing.
Galina told us she had done all of these things with SPAM as a teenage girl trying to survive. She lost nearly her entire family in the siege, and several who escaped the city before it began were never heard from again. She rebuilt her postwar life in the city, eventually met and married Sacha’s father there, and in the early 70’s – in the midst of the Soviet exile of major writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, she and her only child were driven from the country. In all those years after the war, once the emergency in the city and American Lend-Lease aid had ended, Galina had never again smelled or tasted Miracle Meat.
Until she stood in my living room in Hawaii, roughly thirty-five years later, taking a piece of it from the hand of a seven-year-old Lutheran pastor’s kid who had been quite afraid of her “differentness” just minutes before.
Galina ate the entire can of SPAM as she told her story, so my mom opened another two cans of it - all of us ended up having SPAM and Cabbage and Rice with Galina and Sacha that day. And I didn’t complain about it at all then, or since.
We never saw the mother and son again. But Galina – and her SPAM story – marked an early turning point for me. I hadn’t known anything about Leningrad or the Soviet Union or even World War II in Europe at that age, but I started to learn more about it. Trips to the library for Time-Life books on the Siege of Leningrad and the war in Europe soon followed. My maternal grandfather’s service as a Marine in the Pacific dovetailed with that interest, and a lifelong student – and eventual professor - of Modern European history was born.
But it goes even further – Galina’s story didn’t just introduce me to the scope of the horrors of the Second World War, but did so in a viscerally human way, with as stark a look imaginable at the costs such horrors inflict on everyday people. In the broad sweeps of studying major events like wars, with statistics of dead so massive that they defy imagination, it is disturbingly easy to lose sight of what individual suffering and hardship looks like, and to understand how such traumas affect individuals for years afterwards, influencing every part of themselves – their thoughts, feelings, relationships, and mental / emotional / spiritual health. Galina and SPAM helped ensure that I didn’t drift too far from the “humanness” of history as I studied it more broadly and deeply, debating larger methodological theories and the significance of events with my peers, professors, and colleagues over beers at backyard barbeques or in musty classrooms.
My longtime mantra that “everyone has a story worth telling, even if it isn’t obvious at first glance” started with Galina that day, and her influence on my new path as an author of historical fiction remains profound. She and SPAM, too, still remind me of one essential truth that I try to apply with everyone I meet, and with those I don’t agree on anything from history to religion to politics to social issues to sports teams to who makes the best hamburger:
Context matters. Always. It’s such a powerful word.
SPAM taught me that first. Galina’s Miracle Meat.
In our context today, SPAM is not a healthy food; in Galina’s 1944 context, it was beyond healthy – it saved lives.
To us, SPAM is a “Gut Bomb” or “Death Meat Product.” To Galina and hundreds of thousands of others, it’s “Miracle Meat.”
Depending on their context, both are correct. Neither are wrong. They just Are.
These SPAM Lessons still resonate with me, and enter my consciousness, nearly every day.
How often do we dismiss or denigrate or ignore something or someone because we simply do not understand their context? How often are we even interested in finding out? Or do we simply assume our own context is really the “most correct” and judge people, ideas, and situations by that yardstick?
In times like we are in today, in this Dumpster Fire of 2020, perhaps there is much we can learn from SPAM and Galina.
What we do not need, others might.
What we don’t believe, others may for damned good reasons.
What we have the ability to choose, others might not.
What we have options for, others might not.
What we think is unexplainable may very well be quite explainable, should we choose to ask and listen.
What we think of as right, may not always be.
When we think we know “enough” of something or someone, we most likely do not.
All of this may complicate things for us, bring up questions we don’t want to ask or answer, shake foundational beliefs that we don’t want disturbed. And all of that is legitimately tough work when we choose to do it.
But it also provides the most important thing imaginable for us – it connects us to other human beings on a fundamental level, regardless of our differing contexts. So much that we argue about, hate each other for, criticize each other about, judge each other over, stay away from each other about, and fear in ourselves, can become as moot as the fear I had for Galina before I heard her SPAM story. It can all happen in minutes.
In that amount of time, Galina’s story of how SPAM saved her life changed mine.
Whose “SPAM stories” could change us? Only one way to find out, really - be open to the Galinas who appear in our world.
And recognize we might already know them - they might be our partner, our parent, our child, that ex, our worst enemy, that family secret, or that uncle we don’t talk to about politics.
Letting other people’s contexts into our lives just might change them for the better.
Maybe SPAM – literally and figuratively - can be a miracle.
Maybe that sounds too simple.
Or maybe what we insist can’t be so simple, really might be.
Admit it…. It might.
Just ask Galina.
If you’d like to get more information on the Siege of Leningrad, check out this short list of book recommendations by journalist Anna Reid, whose book on the Siege continues to be widely read. For a powerful novelization, check out David Benioff’s haunting “City of Thieves”
The wartime history of SPAM is fascinating. For a quick primer, check out this article from the Smithsonian. This article is pretty fun, too.
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Thanks for reading My Sunday Post. Here are important updates on some other parts of my week:
Soul Book of the Week: Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle
Book On My Nightstand: The SS Officer’s Armchair by Daniel Lee
Best Show I Watched: The Mandalorian - Season 2, Episode 6
Best Meal I Cooked: Spicy Ginger Chicken with Vegetables
Strongest Ear Worm Song: “Cut Me Some Slack” (Sound City Edition) by Paul McCartney / Dave Grohl
Hardest Thing I’m Glad I Did: My boxing class - one hour of joyous hell
Longest Run / Ride of the Week: 8.2 mile run (Monday)
Best New Word I Learned: “Kummerspeck” - German for “Grief Bacon” (Emotional Overeating)
Biggest “Oh &$@#” Moment: No wallet at the grocery store checkout
Most Profound Thing I Heard: “Does that really have to be A Thing to think about, JD?”
