Viking Bait

Viking bait being, of course, Spam:

One of the few processed products we buy, and one of the few factory farmed items besides Tillamook cheese, is Spam. "What?!" I hear you cry. "That's so not you!" Oh yes it is, when we po'.

Almost all of the meat we buy is ethically farmed (the eggs, too). We know the farmers, we know the conditions under which they grow and harvest their animals. We pay on average $4 a pound for meat. When you eat as much meat as we do--and we eat PILES of it since we don't eat much if any grain--we need to economize somewhere, especially on breakfast meat. Jo needs, I mean really needs, meat at breakfast.

So Spam it is. The Weston A. Price Foundation has Spam on its shopping guide for those folks who can't afford or don't have access to quality meat sources, and that's a lot of folks. It's a good source of both protein and fat. (Remember: Fat Is Good For You, as long as it's not hydrogenated and/or rancid.) Spam has no MSG, it's shelf-stable like forever, and it's tasty. It's also a mainstay of several Asian diets that produce healthy, long-lived people (notably Okinawa).

Spam was on sale at Safeway this week for $1.99 a can. That works out to $2.65/lb. For us, that's cheap. We cleaned them out. The store manager was not happy. We were unsympathetic.