Spam

Dateline: July 5, 1937 - Spam, the luncheon meat, was introduced into the market by the Hormel Foods Corporation. Spam (its name a portmanteau of the words "Spiced" and "Ham") is a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation . The labeled ingredients in the classic variety of Spam are chopped pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, and sodium nitrite as a preservative. Spam's gelatinous glaze, or aspic, forms from the cooling of meat stock.The product has become part of many jokes and urban legends about mystery meat, which has made it part of pop culture and folklore.

Through a tv production  Monty Python sketch, in which Spam is portrayed as ubiquitous and inescapable, its name has come to be given to"  electronic spam, including spam email." first televised in 1970. In the sketch, two customers are in a greasy spoon café trying to order a breakfast from a menu that includes Spam in almost every dish. (among them, "Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, served in a Provençale manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam"), The term spam (in electronic communication, and general slang) is derived from this sketch

 The phenomenon, some years later, of marketers drowning out discourse by flooding Usenet newsgroups and individuals' email with junk mail advertising messages was named spamming, due to some early internet users that flooded forums with the word spam recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of Spam in the sketch. This phenomenon has been reported in court decisions handed down in lawsuits against spammers - see, for example, CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015, n. 1 (S.D.Ohio 1997).

In 2007, the seven billionth can of Spam was sold. On average, 3.8 cans are consumed every second in the United States.