In 1937 at the Hormel Foods plant in Austin, Minnesota, the company introduced SPAM, a canned meat product made from pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, sugar, and sodium nitrite that would become one of the most widely distributed and culturally significant processed foods in world history. Hormel's innovation was to create an affordable, shelf-stable meat product that required no refrigeration, making it ideal for the Great Depression economy and, subsequently, for military field rations during World War II. SPAM's combination of meat, sugar, and salt in a highly processed, long-lasting form epitomizes the processed food innovations that would later be classified as junk food when consumed in excess.

SPAM became an unexpectedly powerful poetic symbol, appearing in the work of Pacific Islander and Asian poets for whom the product represents both American colonial presence and culinary transformation, as in the Chamorro and Hawaiian food poetry traditions. The canned meat also features in British poetry about wartime and postwar austerity, and in contemporary American poetry by writers like Sherman Alexie who use SPAM to explore the intersection of indigenous identity, poverty, and the processed food systems imposed on Native communities.