During World War II, wherever American troops were sent, they left the canned meat known as SPAM in their wake. When American GIs landed overseas, they often tossed cans of SPAM out of trucks to feed hungry people. Producer Gabrielle Berbey of The Experiment podcast is familiar with that story: It’s how her grandfather first came to know and love SPAM as a kid in the Philippines. But 80 years later, SPAM no longer feels American. It is now a staple Filipino food: a beloved emblem of Filipino identity. Gabrielle sets out on a journey to understand how SPAM made its way into the hearts of generations of Pacific Islanders, and ends up opening a SPAM can of worms.
Thanks to our friends at The Experiment from WNYC Studios and The Atlantic. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Julia Longoria with help from Peter Bresnan and Alina Kulman. Editing by Kelly Prime, with help from Emily Botein, Jenny Lawton, Scott Stossel, and Katherine Wells. Fact-check by William Brennan and Michelle Ciarrocca. Sound design by David Herman with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Transcription by Caleb Codding. Special thanks to Noella Levy and Craig Santos Perez. You can listen to the rest of “SPAM: How The American Dream Got Canned” here.
The Sporkful production team includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Hara, Johanna Mayer, Tracey Samuelson, and Jared O'Connell.
Music in this episode from Alexander Overington, Tasty Morsels, and Black Label Music:
- “A Painting of a Frog” by Parish Council
- “The Grey Around It” by Parish Council
- “More Shingles” by Keyboard
- “Mog” by Ob
- “Jussa Trip” by Laurie Bird
- “Simply Ukulele” by Cullen Fitzpatrick
- “Star Shootin’ (Light)” by Hayley Briasco
Additional audio from U.S. National Archives, Paramount News, gilbertoy69, PublicDomainFootage.
Photo courtesy of Alex Maida/WNYC Studios.
View Transcript
[A PAN SIZZLE]
Gabrielle Berbey: That looks really good!
Lola: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: This is producer Gabrielle Berbey [bur-BAY] and her grandma ...
Gabrielle Berbey: Wait, Lola, what are you doing here?
Dan Pashman: Her Lola …
Lola: Ah, I’m making scrambled eggs so we can mix it with the fried rice.
Dan Pashman: They're making a typical Filipino dish.
Lola: I want to make it the brownish, so I’m sautéing it.
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh my god. This smells so good.
Lola: Well, it smells like SPAM!
[LAUGHING]
Gabrielle Berbey: The typical Filipino dish? It’s SPAM! You know — the all-American mystery meat that comes in a blue-and-yellow can.
Lola: Can you see the oil coming up from the SPAM?
Gabrielle Berbey: Wait, you didn’t put any oil in this pan?
Lola: No, I didn’t put! It’s so fatty.
[LAUGHING]
Gabrielle Berbey: This salty, fatty, delicious American icon?
Lola: It’s considered one of our delicacy.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: We put it on Filipino bread.
Lola: You can put it in the pan de sal … We have SPAM tocino … SPAM adobo … Caldereta …
Gabrielle Berbey: It’s a staple in many Filipino dishes.
Berbey’s Mom: I mean, I introduced it to you guys, but we weren’t eating it every day. Um …
Gabrielle Berbey: And my mom would only bring it out for special occasions.
Gabrielle Berbey: Like birthdays? Lazy Sundays, you know, when we’re not so hurried.
Lola: Yeah!
Gabrielle Berbey: Good grades.
Berbey’s Mom: Okay, it reminds you of home. I think that’s what it is. You know, SPAM reminds you of home.
Gabrielle Berbey: Is that home in the Philippines, or home — home in America?
Berbey’s Mom: No, home in the Philippines.
Gabrielle Berbey: SPAM really feels like it’s ours — like, it should be on the FIlipino flag or something.
Lola: Because all the Filipinos love SPAM.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies it’s for eaters, I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. This week we’re bringing you a story from our friends at The Experiment. It’s a podcast about our unfinished country, from WNYC Studios and The Atlantic. It’s hosted by Julia Longoria, who you’ll hear from a little later on.
Dan Pashman: But producer Gabrielle Berbey, she's going to continue taking us on this journey and she's gonna asks a pretty simple question: Why is SPAM, this All-American food that was originally made from meat slaughtered and packaged in the heartland — why does it feel so distinctly Filipino? And how did SPAM get to the Philippines in the first place?
CLIP (PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT): [DRAMATIC MUSIC] December 7, 194 1...
Gabrielle Berbey: The story starts on a horrific day in U.S. history.
CLIP (PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT):A date which will live in infamy.
Gabrielle Berbey: Hours after bombing Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops bombed Manila, which is the capital of the Philippines, where my family is from.
CLIP (OLD NEWS ANCHOR 1): Manila has just been bombed. Manila has just been bombed. In fact ...
Gabrielle Berbey: And what happened next, when my grandfather was just about 10-years-old, is a story he would tell over and over again throughout the course of his life. My mom and my Lola remember it …
Lola: I remember him on the bed telling the story to the kids, and they are all on the floor.
Berbey’s Mom: My dad told me that during World War II, he was a young boy and, um …
Gabrielle Berbey: After the Japanese troops invaded the Philippines, they began committing war crimes. They were killing Filipinos. They were raping women. That’s when my grandfather and his family had to flee their home to the mountains to hide from the Japanese — living in fear, always ready to run at a moment’s notice, trying to avoid the Japanese army. And this went on for more than three years.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: But in 1945, American troops landed. And my Lolo saw these big military trucks with American flags rolling through the dusty roads of the provinces ...
MUSIC
CLIP (OLD NEWS ANCHOR 1): But now, fulfilling his pledge to the Filipino people, General Douglas MacArthur has returned ...
CLIP (OLD NEWS ANCHOR 2): Crowds wildly welcome MacArthur and their freedom. They have starved and suffered but lived!
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: I picture him really little and, like, sprinting toward these big military trucks, and the American GIs would throw food to the kids that were chasing them. But my Lolo remembers them throwing cans of SPAM.
MUSIC
Berbey’s Mom: Because they would exchange cans of SPAM for fresh eggs. And bring dozens of eggs to the American GIs, and he’d get, you know, a lot of SPAM.
Gabrielle Berbey: For him, these cans of SPAM and these, like, kind of foods that American soldiers had? This was, like, the gifts from the saviors.
CLIP (OLD NEWS ANCHOR 3): Food at last after days of starvation but relief for all is in sight.
Gabrielle Berbey: Like, this was … freedom.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: After my Lolo caught his first can of SPAM, he fell in love with the idea of American freedom. For him, SPAM meant opportunity: a hope that something better is coming. It became his mission in life to move his family, eventually, to the U.S.
Gabrielle Berbey: His son, my uncle, was the first person in my family to immigrate here, and he would send care packages back to my family in the Philippines, that we called balikbayan boxes, full of SPAM. My Lola remembers opening the boxes, seeing the blue-and-yellow can, thinking, “We’ll be together soon — in America!” For us, SPAM is a symbol of love. It’s a way of saying, “I’m thinking about you.”
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: And it turns out, a similar pattern played out all over the world.
Gabrielle Berbey: Hello?
Food Historian 1: Hello? Can you hear me?
Gabrielle Berbey: Hi. I think we lost connection.
Historian 3: Hey Gabrielle. Sorry. I, like — I’m in grading-papers mode and ...
Gabrielle Berbey: I made some calls to food historians.
Historian 3: The largest numbers of SPAM dispersal happened during the second phase of the Pacific Theater.
Historian 2: Places like Guam, Hawaii, Philippines … [Fades out.]
Gabrielle Berbey: And they told me that, wherever there was an American military presence, SPAM was left in its wake.
Historian 2: It’s a kind of … almost like an informal way to spread American democracy.
Gabrielle Berbey: But I also wanted to know: Why did it stay?
Gabrielle Berbey: Because it’s one thing for American GIs to bring it in, have it be part of their food rations, and sometimes give it away — but then it becomes this staple. I mean, how does that happen?
Historian 3: I’m not sure. I was trying to research it before we spoke. And I was, like, literally looking through, like, historical documents ...
Historian 2: There hasn’t been enough history done of it.
Gabrielle Berbey: No one could answer my question.
Historian 3: I, I can’t give you the historical answer.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: So, the next logical step was to go straight to the source: To a town called Austin. Not Austin, Texas. Austin, Minnesota: SPAMtown U.S.A.
Dan Pashman: After the break, Gabrielle Berbey and host Julia Longoria journey to the birthplace of SPAM.
Gabrielle Berbey: That kind of looks like SPAM.
Julia Longoria: Yeah, right?
Gabrielle Berbey: It looks like a SPAM can!
Dan Pashman: Stick around.
MUSIC
+++ BREAK +++
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. This week we’re talking about SPAM… but last week, I got to talk about ham.
CLIP (ANDRÉ HUESTON MACK): There's no other American ham bar. This is the largest selection of American ham anywhere.
Dan Pashman: That’s André Hueston Mack, owner of & Sons Ham Bar in Brooklyn. Before André got into ham — and yes, he’s really into ham as you’ll hear — his first love was wine. We talk about how he went from a job in finance to being the Best Young Sommelier in America to making his own wine, and then, natural next step, to collecting meat slicers.
CLIP (ANDRÉ HUESTON MACK): I'm like, what is that thing over there that looks like a Ferrari? It's like candy painted red, nickel plated. I'm like — they're like, "Oh, those? That's a meat slicer." And I was like, That's kind of an odd thing to collect, who collects a meat slicer.
CLIP (Dan Pashman): [LAUGHS]
CLIP (ANDRÉ HUESTON MACK): And then ... and then... and then the obsession started.
Dan Pashman: That one’s up now, it’s called "How Frasier Got André Mack Obsessed With Wine". Yes, it involves the TV show Fraiser. It's up now. Check it out.
Dan Pashman: Okay, back to SPAM and our friends Gabrielle Berbey and Julia Longoria of the podcast, The Experiment.
[AN AIRPLANE PASSES OVERHEAD]
Julia Julia Longoria: On a hot August afternoon, we stepped off the plane in Minneapolis into the scorching sun and began our two-hour drive south.
Gabrielle Berbey: This is … It is beautiful. Like, it looks like a painting.
Julia Julia Longoria: Yeah.
Gabrielle Berbey: With the corn and the clouds, the sky is like a soft blue …
Julia Longoria: Through cornfields …
Gabrielle Berbey: This road feels like it goes forever!
Julia Longoria: Tons of cornfields …
Gabrielle Berbey: Yeah, I think this is, in fact, like, the middle of the country. This is — this is —
Julia Longoria: To Austin, Minnesota: the birthplace of SPAM.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: Look at all the nice porches!
Julia Longoria: Driving around certain parts of SPAMtown, it feels driving onto a Leave It to Beaver set from the 1950s.
Julia Longoria: There’s, like, a seafoam-green house, a little brick church steeple …
Julia Longoria: It’s a mix of farmland, strip malls, suburban single-family homes, and a quaint little downtown.
Gabrielle Berbey: And on the left is this little cabin, and it says, “The AmericInn.”
Julia Longoria: Our hotel, the AmericInn, felt like a ski lodge.
Gabrielle Berbey: This looks like a living room with family photos on the wall.
Julia Longoria: In the corner, next to the front desk …
Gabrielle Berbey: It says “George and Lillian Hormel.”
Julia Longoria: There are all of these old family portraits of the Hormel family.
Gabrielle Berbey: The photos of the creators of SPAM are here. But then when I look at these white men in long coats and bowler hats in this sepia-toned photograph in this, like, American town, I’m like, “How did their SPAM come to the Philippines and become my SPAM?” These are not my ancestors! [LAUGHS]
Gabrielle Berbey: And right away, at the hotel breakfast, it became clear that SPAM is the main attraction of Austin.
Hotel Guest 1: Our parents all ate SPAM.
John Dobbs: Yeah.
Gabrielle Berbey: Where are you guys all from?
Hotel Guest 1: Michigan.
Hotel Guest 2: And I live in Florida now.
Dobbs: Fargo, North Dakota. And darn proud of it, too, I might add.
[LAUGHING]
Gabrielle Berbey: People from all over the world travel here to visit the famous SPAM Museum.
Dobbs: It was used heavily by the troops.
Gabrielle Berbey: The North Dakotan that we met at breakfast said that he served in the military. He worked in the kitchens where he cooked SPAM.
Hotel Guest 1: Do you think that was where my dad got his taste for it?
Gabrielle Berbey: And the woman from Florida said that her father first was introduced to SPAM during World War II.
Hotel Guest 2: Um, he was all over the Pacific.
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh, yeah. Well, it’s funny that you say that your dad …
Gabrielle Berbey: So of course, I told her about my grandfather.
Gabrielle Berbey: … Because American GIs would throw cans of SPAM at …
Hotel Guests: Oh cool!
Gabrielle Berbey:— at the kids.
Hotel Guest 2: That’s why the GIs would have — they were fed it a lot. And I think that’s why they had a distaste for it, ’cause they … It was, like, pushed at them all the time.
Gabrielle Berbey: I was actually so surprised to hear that her father didn’t like my Lolo’s beloved SPAM.
Hotel Guest 2: There was a lot of, maybe ugly memories associated with it because it brought back memories of the war.
Dobbs: Yeah.
Gabrielle Berbey: For her dad, it was something that was probably tied to probably one of the hardest and most violent moments of his life.
Hotel Guest 2: Yeah, and — and that, that part was hard.
Gabrielle Berbey: Whereas, whereas for my grandpa, for him, getting …
Hotel Guest 2: It was a good memory.
Gabrielle Berbey: It was a good memory ...
MUSIC
Julia Longoria: Next, we went back downtown, where we were faced with a vision in blue.
Gabrielle Berbey: That kind of looks like SPAM.
Julia Longoria: Yeah.
Gabrielle Berbey: It looks like a SPAM can.
Julia Longoria: It does. And the yellow letters.
Gabrielle Berbey: We arrived at the SPAM Museum: a SPAM-shaped building in the center of downtown Austin. I want to find out how SPAM became a staple food in places like the Philippines.
Gabrielle Berbey: We’re entering the SPAM Museum!
Gabrielle Berbey: It has a distinct Willy Wonka vibe.
Gabrielle Berbey: Julia, look at the SPAM line!
Gabrielle Berbey: Hovering above your head is this SPAM production line with these, like, brightly colored SPAM cans chugging along the conveyor belt.
Savile Lord: Hi, I’m Savile! Savile Lord.
Gabrielle Berbey: Hi, I’m Gabrielle!
Savile Lord: Gabrielle! Nice to meet you.
Gabrielle Berbey: Nice to meet you.
Gabrielle Berbey: And we were immediately greeted by the woman who runs the museum.
Savile Lord: I’m the SPAManager.
Gabrielle Berbey: Saville Lord, the SPAManager.
Savile Lord: Yes! So everything with SPAM we make — we have fun with. We have SPAMbassadors who help us here at the museum. We have about 20 of them. And I’m the SPAMmanager. And then we, um, really encourage people when they leave the museum, to have a SPAMtastic day. We SPAMples, which are just a little piece of SPAM with a pretzel.
Gabrielle Berbey: SPAMples!
Savile Lord: SPAMples. So it’s really very nice. And so what I thought I could do is show you the SPAM ballet.
[CAN-CAN MUSIC PLAYS]
Julia Longoria: They play footage from the meatpacking plant with forklifts carrying hundreds and hundreds of SPAM cans — all set to a ballet. You forget that this is all taking place at a slaughterhouse.
Savile Lord: It is several miles’ worth of cans. And that is going into that six-story pressure cooker.
Gabrielle Berbey: When you’re in the factory, does it feel, like, dizzying like this? Like SPAM just flying around?
Savile Lord: No, it does not. But it’s a lot of SPAM. It is a lot of SPAM.
[THE CAN-CAN ENDS TO GREAT FANFARE]
Gabrielle Berbey: SPAManager Savile told us the history of this magical meat.
MUSIC
Savile Lord: So SPAM was originally about the length of a loaf of bread.
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh, that’s huge! Oh my god.
Savile Lord: So that’s a luncheon loaf.
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh my god.
Savile Lord: Yeah! So you would serve four or five people, the average size of a family, and you wouldn’t have to worry about refrigeration.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: Behind all the whimsy, SPAM was born out of a really dark time. It was created in 1937, during the Great Depression. The country was struggling: Families needed cheap food, workers needed jobs, and companies were losing money. But the Hormel Company came up with a clever way to avoid laying off its workers. They invented a new, cheap product that would create more work and bring in more revenue. From the parts of the pig that were normally tossed out, they created a salty, fatty source of protein: Spiced Ham, or SPAM.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: And then a few years later, World War II hit, and SPAM spread all over the world. It wasn’t the healthiest thing to send with the soldiers, but it preserved well and it was packed with calories.
Savile Lord: There’s a lot of people over there. Why don’t we head over into the Philippines and then we can head back over there so it’s not too loud?
Gabrielle Berbey: So then she took us around the corner …
Savile Lord: This is our international area.
Gabrielle Berbey: And there were booths all over the museum dedicated to South Korea, Hawaii, Latin America, Japan, China …
Gabrielle Berbey: Can I look at the Philippines one?
Savile Lord: Absolutely, go right ahead!
Gabrielle Berbey: And there was this whole booth in the museum dedicated to the Philippines!
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh, yeah, the balikbayan box. How do you guys know what that is?
Savile Lord: Oh, we definitely know what the balikbayan box is. And for those of you who don’t know what the balikbayan box is, it is a gift box that people — usually in the United States — would send home to their families ...
Gabrielle Berbey: Those care packages that my uncle would lovingly fill with SPAM and send back to my Lola in the Philippines? Here they were on display in a museum exhibit!
Julia Longoria: I wonder — how did the company come to know about the way it was used in this way? It’s almost like you need a food anthropologist to, like …
Savile Lord: We have a food anthropologist on staff here!
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh, you do?
Savile Lord: We absolutely do. Yeah!
Gabrielle Berbey: What do they …
Gabrielle Berbey: The fact that Filipinos love SPAM so much felt like Filipino insider baseball to me. But the SPAM Museum made clear: All along, SPAM loved us back.
Gabrielle Berbey: It says, "As a token of our love for the Philippines, we have created a special Filipino flavor, SPAM Tocino ..."
Gabrielle Berbey: So, for decades after American GIs packed up and left the Philippines, the company knew that it had captured the hearts of an accidental market, and they worked hard to keep it. They became experts in Filipino culture.
Savile Lord: So there was a boy band called All for SPAM in the Philippines between 2017 and 2018, and all they did was sing about SPAM.
Gabrielle Berbey: [Laughing.] No way. What?!
Gabrielle Berbey: Hormel even created a Filipino boy band — which, Filipinos love boy bands — and they styled it after the Backstreet Boys.
[ALL FOR SPAM PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND]
Gabrielle Berbey: All for SPAM: These four boys dressed in all white are part of this — this boy band, and they just sing about SPAM?
Savile Lord: Yep!
Gabrielle Berbey: Walking around the museum, immersed in the story that Hormel tells about SPAM, it’s easy to fall in love with this product — like my Lolo did.
Gabrielle Berbey: My grandpa would be, like, in tears. [LAUGHS.] He’d be in tears. Oh my god, I feel emotional. He’d be so happy to be here!
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: Forget that it was originally leftover pig parts born of the Great Depression. Forget that American GIs hated SPAM so much, the company kept a hefty file of hate mail from soldiers trashing SPAM. Forget that it was spread all over the world because of war! Here at the museum, SPAM is all color and light, this symbol of opportunity and family.
Gabrielle Berbey: But today, 80 years after it landed in the Pacific, love for SPAM can be complicated. And nearly 4,000 miles away, on the island of Guam, people eat more SPAM per capita than anywhere in the world.
MUSIC
Craig Santos Perez: There is no path to SPAM. SPAM is the path.
Gabrielle Berbey: I even found a Guamanian poet, Craig Santos Perez, who writes meditations on SPAM.
Craig Santos Perez: I imagine that there was a great drought …
Gabrielle Berbey: He invented an origin story of SPAM as a Guamanian mythology …
Craig Santos Perez: One of our traditional healers started weeping to the ground and from her tears sprouted these hard nuts, and they saw this gelatinous meat inside.
Gabrielle Berbey: Where it came from the land and from the indigenous Chamorros.
Craig Santos Perez: And they were fed, generation upon generation.
MUSIC
Craig Santos Perez: Until the Americans came.
Gabrielle Berbey: Until the Americans came!
Santos Perez: And decided to can.
Gabrielle Berbey: To can all of it!
[LAUGHING]
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: For that Guamanian SPAM poet, Craig Santos Perez …
Craig Santos Perez: Guam is the SPAM capital of the world. On average …
Gabrielle Berbey: His poetry makes a connection between Guam’s undying love for SPAM …
Craig Santos Perez: The end result can be found in the newspaper’s obituary pages.
Gabrielle Berbey: And the island’s health crisis, from its dependence on imported canned foods. I talked to a health clinic in Hawaii that’s actually trying to help local Hawaiians make healthier, homemade versions of SPAM.
Craig Santos Perez: The name itself stands for “specially processed army meat,” “salted pork and more,” “some people are missing.”
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: My Lolo died a few years ago, in part from diabetes complications. And when he was first diagnosed, SPAM was the first food to go. But for him, SPAM could forever do no wrong. In a way, his first can of SPAM was a gelatinous seed that planted the idea of his American Dream. A dream that came true for him in the end. One by one, all of his kids came to the U.S., and later brought him here too. And now, here I am. An American.
Craig Santos Perez: [BURPS LOUDLY] Thank you! Sorry, I always do a burp at the end of that poem.
Gabrielle Berbey: [LAUGHING]
Gabrielle Berbey: And this is where I thought the story ended. Case closed. Let’s go home.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: But throughout my reporting process, this other thing kept coming up — this thing that had nothing to do with my original question. But all of these historians I talked to were like, “Well, are you going to talk about the strike?” And, at first, when I heard about it, I was like, “What strike?” And they were like, “Well, you can’t talk about SPAM without talking about the strike.” So when I was in the museum, I asked about it.
Gabrielle Berbey: We also talked to someone who mentioned that there was a — like, a strike at the SPAM factory in the ’80s. Is that something, do you guys have history of that here?
Savile Lord: We don’t talk about the strike here at the museum, no.
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh, okay
Savile Lord: Because that wasn’t directly related to SPAM.
Gabrielle Berbey: Oh, okay. I see, I see.
Gabrielle Berbey: We supposedly had to talk about the strike, but then no one would talk to us about it.
MUSIC
Gabrielle Berbey: So I started calling local Austonians.
Voice 1: Hello?
Gabrielle Berbey: Can you hear me okay?
Voice 2: I sure can. Yeah, sounds perfect.
Gabrielle Berbey: Okay! Great, great. Thank you so much for …
Gabrielle Berbey: So when I say that people don’t talk about the strike, I mean, like, to this day, they don’t talk about this strike.
Voice 3: Oh, you better believe people don’t want to talk about it. There are still people who are not speaking to each other.
Voice 4: It was like the elephant in the room. Nobody really talked about it.
Voice 3: We don’t talk about these things. We don’t talk about things that are difficult or cause pain.
Gabrielle Berbey: The strike tore this town apart.
Voice 5: I knew two brothers who were just fighting and, for many years, did not talk to one another because to cross that picket line was the worst.
Gabrielle Berbey: Families and friendships are torn apart.
Voice 5: They were not speaking and did not speak for years. Parents against children, children against parents.
Gabrielle Berbey: This is a dark stain on the town.
Voice 6: It was horrible.
Voice 7: You can feel the trauma of this strike. It didn’t destroy Austin, but it did change it forever. It is part of the creation myth of that town.
Gabrielle Berbey: You know, if there’s a defining moment for the town, it’s this.
Voice 7: Everybody’s got something ugly in their past that defines them, whether we want it to or not. And there are a lot of things you can say about Batman, but at some point you’re going to have to talk about the Joker. And I don’t think you can talk about Austin without talking about the Joker, which is this strike.
Gabrielle Berbey: That's next week.
Dan Pashman: You can find the episode about the Hormel strike over at the feed of The Experiment, from WNYC Studios and The Atlantic. There’s also a third episode in their SPAM series, about a mysterious disease that spread among the people making SPAM in the early 2000s.
CLIP (SPAM MUSUBI SONG): One, two, three, SPAM musubi! Four, five, six, don’t need chopsticks! Seven, eight, nine, tastes so divine! Ten, let’s do it again! One, two, three, SPAM musubi!
