As a child, I was familiar with several of these meat impersonators, occasionally bringing the odd SPAM or Vienna Sausage sandwich to school with me, and particularly partaking in Potted Meat (tm) on a slice of bread. My sister JoAnn was a master when it came to using a thin scraping of Potted Meat on bread as a flavoring agent. She would open a tin, carefully collect a few molecules on the blade of the knife, and spread them on the bread, so that it had just a tinge of pink. Occasionally we would make Frito (R) graveyards in the tin itself, using, of course, Fritos for headstones. (Okay, so we needed lives.)
The bit that really got me about Potted Meat, however, was when I grew a little older and was able to read (gasp!) the ingredients label, and perhaps to try to figure out what these ingredients actually were. Immediately one item jumped to my attention:
Now what, pray tell, do you get when you partially defat beef fatty tissue? Don't you just get beef fatty tissue? Or do you perhaps get beef fatty tissue + those Pythonese "nasty bits"? Do we really want to know? At any rate, any alleged food that contains the suffix, "Food Product," ought to be suspect, to my mind at least.
Welcome to the world of Hormel.
For more information, see Dave Barry's informative article.
Last modified: 8/11/97
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