Spam Taste Test

Question: What causes a grown woman to shriek with glee at a supermarket in Seoul?

Answer:

My grandparent's apartment building has a grocery store on the first floor so whenever we're bored or hungry, we would just go downstairs and find things to eat. It's especially neat when you find things you can't find in the states. Like Spam Singles with mozzarella chicken, fresh onion and sweet potato flavors. My cousins and I were really curious to see what it would taste like, so we bought one of each and did a taste test.

Starting from the top, going clockwise was the onion, mozzarella chicken and sweet potato spam. The charring was my own doing, so don't worry, it didn't come like that.

I had my cousins try each one and try to guess which was which. The mozzarella chicken was a dead giveaway since it's lighter in color.

It was kind of funny to see my cousins' faces change from intrigue to befuddlement to disgust in a matter of seconds. I had to taste them for myself though. Maybe they just don't appreciate Spam like I do.

Dear friends, I am sad to report that these Spam Singles were the single biggest let down of 2010. I really wanted to like it, in fact, so much so that I was calculating in my head how many packages of Spam Singles I could fit in my spare carry on luggage bag that I brought with me to Seoul. Good thing we did a taste test before I committed to buying their whole stock.

The onion one had an unpleasant, artificial aftertaste and you could barely taste the sweet potato flavor to begin with, but once you started trying to exude all the sweet potato flavor from the spam with the surface area of your tongue, you begin to realize the utter foolishness you are partaking in. The mozzarella chicken one tasted the best out of the three, but it tasted like ham and cheese to me, in which case, I'd rather buy a slice of real ham and cheese rather than eat it in this coagulated form.

I'm not really sure what the Spam people were thinking when they came up with this concept. I guess you could get a clue from the pictures on the packaging, but why would you put pieces of mozzarella chicken spam in a Caprese salad? I guess you can make a spam onion sandwich, but just use a real onion for goodness sake. And pieces of spam in a baked sweet potato, that's just weird.

I guess I should have looked at the packaging a bit more closely, but I was blind sighted by my love of all things Spam and all things weird and the excitement of the new discovery got the best of me. I learned my lesson though, why fix something that isn't broken. I will just stick to my classic blue can of Spam, thank you very much.