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Spam, Spam, Spam – lovely Spam!

To most, it’s an old Monty Python skit. But if you’re on Okinawa, it’s a way of life.

Okinawan’s consume an estimated 7.2 million cans of canned pork annually, more than one can for each person per week. It is an indispensable ingredient in popular local dishes such as “po-oku tamago” (pork and eggs) and “goya chanpuru” (bittermelon stir fry), and can be found in virtually every home or restaurant pantry on island.

“In Okinawa, (canned) pork is a kind of soul food,” says Asuka Ganeko of Tulip Food Company, Japan, one of the island’s leading sellers of canned pork. “It is used in virtually everything that’s cooked, not only for goya chanpuru. It is put in miso soup or cooked as stir-fried vegetables, sandwiches, rice balls, noodles and rolled sushi.”

Ganeko, who says she eats canned pork at least once or twice a day, says that although it’s precooked, locals almost never eat it without grilling, broiling or frying it first. Okinawans can be as particular about how to fry canned pork, as Americans are about how to cook their steaks.

“Every person and every family has their own way of cooking (canned) pork,” says Ganeko. “Some like it sliced thick, while others like it sliced thin and cooked well, like bacon. Sometimes, how thick it should be sliced and how to cook it can even lead to quarreling.”

As the mainstay of local comfort foods, most restaurants could not do business without it.

“Any decent restaurant in Okinawa serves good pork and eggs,” says Ganeko. “We Okinawan’s often wonder why it is so much more delicious at restaurants than when we cook them at home.”

It’s no mystery, however, how this canned delicacy became so popular.

“Spam” proper is the precooked canned pork product made by Hormel Foods Corporation in 1937 that was a well-known military staple food in World War II when it came into wide use in soldiers’ C-rations. Since fresh meat was difficult to get to the soldiers on the front, World War II saw the largest use of Spam when troops ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

This signature U.S. military dish of yesteryear has since won the hearts and minds – and taste buds – of select consumers throughout the Pacific. And it is no surprise it has a strong foothold on Okinawa, where locals have long boasted they, “eat every part of the pig except its squeal.” According the canned pork labels, this still holds true today.

the Blue Zones website and documentaries point to the Blue Zones book as evidence that you need to follow a mostly vegetarian diet if you want to live a long, healthy life. In reality, the book provides evidence for a very different kind of diet, as we will see.