I Can't Believe It's Not Luncheon Meat!

By Lee Yu Kit

Jan 6, 2021

Luncheon meat was a staple of my early years. I ate enough of it to keep the local distributor prosperous, if not tilt the trade balance with China. Luncheon meat came in cans from China, although the original product is actually SPAM, by Hormel Foods of the US. It was the right product at the right time, meeting a need for an inexpensive source of meat during the Great Depression, and becoming globally popular after WW2, thanks to its wide distribution wherever US troops went.

Luncheon Meat is still hugely popular, although we now know that it’s a highly processed meat, high in saturated fats, carcinogenic preservatives and low in nutrients, and even protein. But it tastes good, being a mainstay of chap fan (economy rice) vendors and a cheap and tasty, if nastily unhealthy food. 

WHO (World Health Organisation) classifies processed meats as a Class 1 carcinogen. Even luncheon meat lovers won’t deny that their favourite snack is highly-processed, homogenously mushy, suspiciously pink, oozing oil when you cook it and providing that numbing tingle to the tongue after you’ve eaten your fill of it (thanks to the high sodium content).

You can’t relive your childhood love for luncheon meat without a good dollop of guilt and a big hit to your health, and earning your doctor’s disapproving tut-tut.  But wait, what’s this?

I stumbled across vegan luncheon meat at the BiG supermarket in IPC, PJ. Hot on the heels of the explosive success of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, the alternate-meat, plant-based meat, vegan meat, call it what you will-market, has become the hottest new food sensation, growing at a heady pace, even as the global demand for real meat continues to grow.

Health concerns, the global climate crisis, the growing awareness of the environmental impact of meat, in terms of resources and animal welfare, is feeding a frenzy of newcomers to this segment of the market.

While Impossible Foods is rolling out its pork-based alternative, while Beyond Meat has opened processing plants in China, by far the world’s largest consumer of pork, OmniMeat has introduced an assortment of plant-based pork meats specifically made for Asian cuisine.

Although I’d come across OmniMeat’s mince-meat alternative, this was the first time I’d seen Luncheon Meat, which was launched near the end of 2020 in Singapore with a suitable dose of fanfare. A packet sells for RM24, which compares favourably with S9.35 for the product in NTUC supermarkets south of the border.

Each packet contains 6 slices of faux luncheon meat, packed in plastic and looking ingenuously like the real thing, pink rectangles with rounded corners, as if it had been emptied from a rectangular shaped can. Cooking was simple, simply fry in a pan from the frozen product, no thawing required.

It was uncanny, not only did it have the shape and colour (from beet) of the real thing, visually it had the coarse texture as well, and just like luncheon meat from a can, it also oozes oil when you cook it. The product uses coconut oil, rather than lard or whatever mystery meat fat lurks in a can of luncheon meat.

The uncanniness didn’t end there, it even smelled like the real thing, for although it’s been years since I actually ate canned luncheon meat, apparently the recollection of it is easily triggered (probably due to in-depth imprinting from eating far too much of the stuff).  A flood of memories almost overwhelmed me as I stood swaying in the kitchen, spatula in hand, two pink pieces of what, to all appearances, was pork luncheon meat, sizzling away in the pan.  Memories of early KL and childhood days, luncheon meat sandwiches and spinning wooden wheels of the ice-cream man, neighbourhood vendors coming around to sell char siew pow at night – I tell you, a little reminiscing is fine, but too much remembering hurts your head.

Just a couple of minutes on each side, and the mock meat had darkened and become oily. I scooped it out onto a bed of sliced tomato on a piece of toast, as I might have done years earlier, put another slice of toasted bread (sourdough, mind you) closed my eyes and took a big bite. 

So that first bite or two was of tomato and toasted bread, until I bit into that pink slice of moist filling. For heaven’s sake, it even tasted like pork luncheon meat, with the old familiar aroma, but if I step back for a minute, it was softer in texture, without that sometimes crispy edge of well fried canned meat, and I missed the sudden intensity of overladen taste wrought by biting into far too much sodium and whatever else they put into the real pink stuff. But the core of the taste was there, enough to convince the casual eater that this was real luncheon meat, perhaps a little watered down, not fried almost to a crisp. The feel-good buzz of eating cheap meat in some tizzy coffee shop in an insalubrious back alley somewhere in KL, box ticked.

I tried dipping the mock meat slice in beaten egg and frying it, just one of a dozen ways aficionados of pork luncheon cook their favourite salty snack, but beaten egg doesn’t stick well to frozen vegan luncheon meat and I ended up with a sandwich of fried scrambled egg with crispy onion, on a bed of luncheon meat.  Not bad at all.

The ingredient list on the packet mentions Protein Blend (Soy concentrate, wheat gluten, soy isolate) with coconut oil, yeast extract as the main items. It also advertises itself as being nitrate free (nitrates are used in processed meats as preservatives) with no added preservatives and being all-vegan.

For people who buy this, all that may not be as important as reliving their love affair with luncheon meat, a delicious trip down memory lane, if even for a while. I wouldn’t eat this day in and day out, but if I’m feeling a little nostalgic for a time when I didn’t know the difference between healthy and tasty, then this would be just the thing.