Sex, Bombs and Burgers (7 page)

Hitler knew Germany would be cut off from two key resources—oil and rubber—once the war began, so he urged Farben to come up with synthetic alternatives. The results were two big hits: a hydrocarbon made by mixing carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane, which German tanks and other vehicles could use as fuel; and a new, plastic type of rubber. The synthetic rubber was created by bonding together two polymer compounds, butadiene and styrene, into a so-called “copolymer.” Farben called its new substance an elastomer for its elastic properties and officially dubbed it Buna, a contraction of butadiene and Na, the chemical symbol for sodium, which was the catalyst for the polymer reaction.
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Farben’s most notorious invention, however, was Zyklon B, the pesticide used by Nazis to gas concentration camp victims. The chemical conglomerate’s brain trust profited heavily from its association with the Nazis and their concentration camps, both through the slave labour the camps provided and, even more horrifically, from the bountiful test subjects. At its peak, Farben’s factory at Auschwitz in Poland alone made use of 83,000 slave labourers and an undocumented number of unwilling human guinea pigs.
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The conglomerate and many of its most zealous scientists faced justice in the Nuremburg trials that followed the war (thirteen of its directors were found guilty of war crimes and served prison time), but much of the work lived on through component companies after Farben was dismantled in 1951. Several of today’s largest multinational firms owe part of their post-war successes to the often illgotten intellectual property inherited from Farben, including film manufacturer Agfa-Gevaert, chemical maker BASF and pharmaceutical companies Sanofi-Aventis (derived from a
merger of Farben spinoff Hoechst and France’s Rhône-Poulenc Rorer) and Bayer.

Plastics also caused their share of physiological damage. Through the fifties and sixties, research showed that workers producing synthetic substances were vulnerable to developing a host of medical conditions, including heart arrhythmia, hepatitis, gastritis, skin lesions, dermatitis and cancer. Worse still, some plastics—particularly polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polystyrene—were found to be able to leach into food and cause cancer in unsuspecting consumers. By the seventies, the public was wary of plastic and companies using it began to feel the backlash. Coca-Cola, for one, was set to introduce the world’s first plastic soft drink bottle in 1977, but had to pull the plug amid fears that the product could cause cancer. Coke’s bottle, made of acrylonitrile styrene, was designed in conjunction with chemical giant Monsanto at an estimated cost of $100 million. Monsanto’s product application stated that low levels of about fifty parts per billion of carcinogenic plastic “may form and migrate into the beverage”—a negligible amount, but it was enough for the Food and Drug Administration to reject the bottle.
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Monsanto closed its bottle manufacturing plants and Pepsi beat Coke to the punch with a polyethylene bottle, designed by DuPont, that passed FDA muster.

Coke’s first attempt at a plastic bottle—it eventually introduced an FDA-approved product in 1978—was just one casualty of the public’s growing unease with plastics, a discomfort that became part of the battle between consumer advocates and food processors that continues today. In the past few years, for example, health authorities in several countries have banned the
plastic Bisphenol A from baby bottles because tests have linked it to cancer and hormone imbalance.

In addition to health risks, plastics are also strongly associated with environmental damage. Most plastics degrade very slowly, which means that the ketchup bottle in your fridge is likely to be around long after Armageddon. By the eighties, this presented a huge problem for overflowing garbage landfills around the world. Late in the decade, large corporations started to feel pressure from consumer groups to limit their plastic waste output and institute recycling programs. In 1987 one group, the Citizens Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste, found that McDonald’s alone was contributing more than a billion cubic feet of foam packaging waste each year.
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Along with another grassroots group, the Vermonters Organized for Cleanup, the CCHW pressured the fast-food chain into switching to recyclable paper packaging in 1990, a move McDonald’s said would reduce its waste output by about 90 percent.
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For environmentalists, the chain’s switch was a major win, but it was only a small victory in the battle against an overflowing tide of permanent, non-biodegradable waste, a struggle that continues today.

But health and environmental concerns were the furthest thing from the collective minds of people in the fifties and early sixties. They had made it through the worst economic crisis and wars in human history and they wanted a chance to stretch their legs and live it up. As the
Life
ad said, after total war came total living. The microwave oven freed up people’s time from chores like cooking, while plastics provided a veritable cornucopia of new products on which hard-earned salaries could be spent. These consumer goods kicked off a new lifestyle, one dedicated to instant gratification, prosperity and indulgence, the diametric
opposite of life during the thirties and forties. These weapons of mass consumption, derived from inventions that helped perfect the art of killing, forever changed daily life and paved the way for the sort of total living that would come in later decades.

Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly
wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!

—ROALD DAHL,
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Like McDonald’s restaurants everywhere, the chain’s outlets in Hawaii sell a truckload of Egg McMuffins and hash browns every morning. But they also go through a large amount of something few other McDonald’s even sell: Spam. Aside from the usual breakfast fare, Hawaiians can choose from several items that incorporate the canned meat, the most popular being the Spam, eggs and rice platter. The meal features a fried egg, like the one found on a McMuffin, with rice and a cooked slice of the meat. The chain’s biggest rival, Burger King, also offers a Spam platter of rice and scrambled eggs with two slices of the meat. For both companies, having Spam on the menu is a no-brainer, because Hawaiians love Spam. Despite having a population of only 1.2 million people, Hawaii leads the United States in Spam consumption, with more than seven million cans a year, or about six per person.
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McDonald’s sells more than three thousand Spam items in Hawaii every day and has expanded the offering to other Pacific islands, including the Philippines, Saipan and Guam.
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The Guamese even put the Hawaiians’ heavy consumption to shame by eating 2.5 million cans a year, or sixteen per person.
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Why do Pacific Islanders love a food that is reviled by so many others? A food so hated that when it came time to name annoying unwanted email messages, nothing but “Spam” would do?

The love affair started during the Second World War, when the American military imported tons of the canned meat to the islands. To properly understand Spam, though, we have to go back several centuries. Despite being commonly derided as a poor-quality meat, Spam is actually a brilliant application of food technology that traces its lineage back to Napoleon. The French emperor, who famously said that an army marches on its stomach, was faced with the problem of keeping his soldiers fed and well nourished while in the field. In the eighteenth century, a time before any significant food preservation and processing, this was a big challenge. So in 1795 Napoleon announced a contest: he would personally award 12,000 francs, a king’s ransom at the time, to anyone who could invent a food-preservation technique that would help feed his troops. Many tried and failed until Nicolas Appert, a confectioner from a small hamlet east of Paris, answered the call.

In 1810, Appert discovered a process whereby food, generally meat or vegetables, could be preserved when it was sealed in a glass jar, covered with canvas and then boiled. The process greatly lengthened the shelf life of the food by sealing it in its own juices, which emerged during cooking. Appert was not a scientist and didn’t understand the principles behind his discovery, but he knew it worked. His find won him the reward and the emperor’s praise and was soon refined by fellow Frenchman Pierre Durand, who used a tin can instead of a glass jar, which cooked and preserved just as well but had the added bonus of extra durability for transport. Even so, Appert became
known as the father of canning and the inventor of modern food preservation and processing. From then on, the history of food processing evolved in virtual lockstep with the history of war.

Appert’s heir apparent emerged more than a century later across the Atlantic. In 1910 Minnesota-based Hormel was a mid-sized meat-packer with distribution centres in five states and an exporting business to Britain. Jay Hormel, son of founder George, earned his stripes during the First World War, when he served in France as a quartermaster responsible for supplying troops with clothes and provisions. When his superiors complained about the time and effort it took to ship meat across the Atlantic, he came up with a simple suggestion: rather than pack entire sides of beef, why not debone them first? Hormel flew back to the packing plants in Chicago to demonstrate and, before long, small packages of boneless beef were being shipped to Europe, saving time and money. Most importantly, the troops were happy because they got to eat meat more frequently.

After the war, Hormel went to work developing new products for his father, including the first canned ham, using techniques similar to Appert’s. By 1929 he was company president. His big hit, however, came in 1936 while he was searching for a use for pork shoulder, a pig part that was not selling well. Pork shoulder meat, when removed from the bone, came in small chunks that consumers didn’t like—they were used to large chops, the bigger the better. Removing the meat from the bone was also expensive and time-consuming, which compounded the problem. Hormel experimented with additives to make the shoulder pork tastier. Like a modern-day Doctor Frankenstein, he combined it with different parts of the pig before settling on ham, which comes from the animal’s rear thigh. When the two meats were ground
together and mixed with water and salt, they formed a pink paste. Hormel squirted the concoction into a twelve-ounce can, sealed it and cooked it using the Appert method. The result was a tangy ham-like meat. After adding sodium nitrite, a powder added to many meats to prevent them from turning an unappetizing grey, Hormel had his masterpiece. He called it Hormel Spiced Ham, a versatile canned meat that could sit on the shelf for years and not go bad. (The only thing missing from this Frankenstein-like scene was the mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers outside the door.)

His creation, however, didn’t sell. People were suspicious of meat that came in a can. In Napoleon-like fashion, Hormel held a contest at his New Year’s party to come up with a new name. Kenneth Daigneau, a New York actor and brother to one of his company’s vice-presidents, won bragging rights and a crisp $100 bill for thinking to contract “spiced ham” to Spam. Under the more marketable name, the company ran a flood of magazine and newspaper ads that touted the meat’s versatility. “You’ve never known a meat like Spam, Hormel’s miracle meat of many uses for many occasions,” one read. “Slice it cold for Spamwiches, salads, snacks. Serve it hot as Spam and eggs or baked Spam. Any way you eat it, Spam hits the spot.”
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Thanks to the marketing blitz, the product enjoyed modest sales until the war broke out. Then it really took off, which was ironic given that Hormel was fiercely opposed to the United States joining the conflict.

Naturally, Hormel soon changed his tune. As one of the larger meat packers in the United States, with military connections and export ties to the United Kingdom, he had an easy time landing a job as a major supplier to the United States–Britain Lend-Lease program. Aside from weapons and ammunition, the United
States had provided Britain with more than a billion dollars in aid by 1941, including food.
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Spam was selected by the U.S. military as the perfect war food—portable, light, cheap and virtually unspoilable—and it was shipped to Britain for consumption by soldiers and civilians alike. After the United States entered the war, tons more were shipped to troops stationed in Hawaii and other Pacific islands, where it was packaged into rations. By 1944 about 90 percent of Hormel’s Spam output was going to military forces, doubling the company’s overall revenue. Hormel was gobbling up so much tin for cans that supplies for home use were curtailed and civilian Americans were forced to use glass jars.
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By the end of the war, civilians and soldiers worldwide had consumed 100 million pounds of Spam, or 113 million cans.
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Soldiers had a love-hate relationship with the meat. Some, who were forced to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, despised it as “ham that failed its physical.” Others were more appreciative. “I know there were a lot of jokes about Spam,” recalled one infantryman, but “it probably saved lives in the field. It was easy to transport and it could last for a long time.”
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Despite the revulsion, Spam remained popular after the war. Sales reached one billion cans by 1959 and by 2007 it was available in more than a hundred countries.
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Pacific Islanders, meanwhile, adopted it as their native cuisine. For many, Spam is the ideal “comfort food.” Indeed, Spam
musubi
—a strip of the cooked meat sitting on a block of rice, held in place by a sushi-style band of seaweed—was sold in Hawaiian 7-Eleven stores long before McDonald’s thought to get in on the action.