I don’t eat much Spam these days; the stuff is loaded with sodium, so I go with other brands with less sodium.
That said, we ate quite a bit of it, growing up, & I still enjoy it in a sandwich, diced into a stir-fry and/or fried rice. One of these days I plan to dice some on a pizza crust with some pineapple, etc & see how it turns out.
I’m not going to crumble Oreos on it, though.
Yeesh!
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I say this carefully here, but all this loud gawking and gagging at a novelty SPAM-based product is difficult to hear, as someone who grew up as an Asian immigrant. It’s the same sort of discomfort I felt just trying to smile through a conference-room full of white co-workers miming their gagging at some description of ethnic food or some other thing that seems “objectively weird” to westerners.
Or worse, it conjures up memories of fellow students gagging at the lunch my mom packed for me. A SPAM sandwich, until I asked her to never do that ever again.
Looking at this Tweet, I honestly imagined what chocolate cookie crumbles, SPAM and mayo would taste like in my mouth, and I thought, “Hmm. I could test that out.”
Sure, it could be a novelty-gag product introduction on McD’s part as well, but it doesn’t seem to me to be at the level of Korea’s Green-Onion Flavored Chex (which also turns out is not a half-bad savory snack).
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You raise a very good point. Apologies.
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SPAM is an American product. Plenty of non-Asian-Americans ate it growing up and for valid reasons now have a low opinion of it. There’s also a grey area here-- are we mocking an Asian food, or an American company, serving something made up of wholly American ingredients-- SPAM and Oreos. If they introduced this in the US instead of China Americans would react the same. Plenty of Americans were kind of disgusted by KFC’s ‘chicken donut’ sandwich.
We are a world of different cultures and will not always agree on tastes, and that’s fine, it helps make life interesting.
I do agree with @VeronicaConnor and yourself that this burger could actually be pretty good.
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It’s a good reminder though that different cultures have different tastes. This Spam Oreo burger didn’t spring forth from a vacuum. Chefs at McDonalds Corporate had reason to believe it would be enjoyed by people in China (or more likely it was the Chinese branch of the company that came up with it). In that sense, turning up our noses at it is ignorant it best, and flirting with the R-word at worst.
Spam is deeply integrated in Hawaiian cuisine for example, apparently because of their heavy reliance on it during WW2. It stuck and now they make a lot of excellent dishes with it, at all “levels” of cuisine.
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First, green onion chex sounds awesome, second I’ve not said much on the subject, but I’m much more interested in eating ethnic food, of any description, as it wasn’t thought up by a corporation. Mostly because most “odd*” foods ingredients are about conserving the contents, or adding flavor, not the bottom line. I’ve eaten all sorts of foraged, fermented, moldy and repurposed food, all of these things were based in making food last longer, or for cold times, etc… not because they could make a few more cents on a can.
*not tradtional western
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I don’t think this product is a good idea, I don’t think I would order it
but I’m not sure why everybody is professing to be nauseated
People eat Oreos, people eat Spam, folks seem to think these “foods” are tasty albeit not very nutritious
I mean,
Just look at it.
How this came up in a board meeting somewhere is the guess of Gordon Ramsey’s nightmares.
I like spam and I like Oreos. Oreos have a more sophisticated flavour than just being sweet and fried Spam is delicious. I’d definitely give that a try.
I like to keep a supply of long-life food set aside for a rainy day and canned protein is generally hard to come by, tuna and spam being the main exceptions (I dislike tinned salmon and I’m not crazy about tinned sardines).
My only problem with Spam is that eating a whole can of it is too much for a single person. Even if spread out over two or three meals, I get sick of it before I finish the tin.
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After thinking about it a little, I would guess the flavors might not be too different from Mexican mole pablano…some savory meat, some chocolate, maybe a bit of horseradish or wasabi.
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we keep spam in with the hurricane preparedness supplies for the same reasons you mention. that and lots of canned beans, bottled water, wind-up weather radio and torch, etc.
I like spam well enough, I suppose. as @VeronicaConnor mentions above, it’s not bad fried with some beans and eggs for breakfast. not a big fan of Oreos, however, so this combo burger seems challenging to me.
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