Soylent Green Is.........Spam?

With food shortages ongoing globally, and with some areas of the planet in such dire straights that actual food riots have taken place, it seems almost comical in a sense to see the reports in the U.S. media of families having to resort to feeding their families Spam several times a month.

Ah Spam! The gelatinous gooey mass of some form of pork that we were all forced to eat as children. Our parents told us that it was good for us, and we spit it out when they weren't looking. As we grew older, we came to realize that our parents were in the unenviable position of having to figure out how to put meat on the family table, and Spam offered a cheap alternative to more traditional forms of food. We vowed that we would never eat the stuff ever again for as long as we both (the Spam and us) lived.

Made of mostly pork shoulder (One shudders to think of what the other part of mostly means), sugar, salt, water and potato starch, the much aligned food stuff is actually considered a delicacy in some Asian countries, and even Stalin credited Spam with saving Russia from defeat during World War 2 by enabling him to feed his army.

Coming full circle from the times of our childhoods, where we swore off of the Spam and entered adulthood where we could afford regular ham, the economic disaster that has been thrust upon us by the greediest pig corporations in world history has brought the notion that Spam isn't so bad crashing back into the American kitchen.

No longer able to afford to eat regular food, many American families are turning to alternatives such as Ramen noodles and Spam to stretch the food budgets and not let their children go hungry. When a shopper is in the grocery store and looks at the price of beef hovering at $7.00 per pound, but right there on the shelf is a big fat can of Spam for $2.75, well, the Beef Wellington will just have to wait.

Remembering the 1970's movie starring Charleston Heston entitled Soylent Green, one can be struck at the almost prophetic nature of the film. It deals with a situation wherein the world finds itself in a food shortage crisis, and must resort to feeding people crackers called Soylent Green which is made from the bodies of the dead. While not trying to say that Spam is made from the same organic matter, could one not draw a parallel between the current escalating crisis and the all of a sudden 12.4 per cent spike in Hormel's (Spam's makers) profits?

With the demand for traditional

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