Spam is so Vegas.

Actually, it’s the most Vegas thing ever.

Mrs. Bun: What have you got, then? Waitress: Well there’s egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and Spam; egg, bacon and Spam; egg, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam; Spam Spam, Spam, egg and Spam …

— “Spam,” Monty Python, 1970

Raffi, my 7-year-old son, is lounging on the couch, playing Zelda on his Nintendo Switch, lobbing chunks of Spam into his mouth.

Raffi loves Spam. Because back when he lived with his biological parents, before they lost him to foster care and adoption, they kept him alive on it. I message Jason, his first dad.

He jokingly admits it’s all his fault. “I eat Vienna sausages and Spam out of the can all the time,” he tells me, as I watch my son in his underpants, a bare leg slung over the arm of the couch, eating straight out of the can.

Spam, the famous mystery meat, is a canned loaf of pork and ham, with a potato starch binder, a little sugar, and a preservative. It comes in many iterations — jalapeño, garlic and tocino, cheese, bacon, chorizo, light, low-salt; the list is endless. Most of us either love it or despise it. I mean, it’s pink, for God’s sake. It forces you to have an opinion. It comes out of the can in a gloriously fatty, gelatinous brick. It is salty and sweet and porky and so good fried, the edges brown and crunchy and oily. And in our house, Spam is one of my son’s connections to his bio family. To his earlier life. He wants Spam in his life the way he wants them in his life.

That’s the power of taste.

This makes evolutionary sense. Strong and emotional food memories helped us survive. Back on the savannah, sketchy food — the wrong berry, a spoiled antelope carcass — could kill you. Memories of pain and discomfort kept you from making mistakes again.

The opposite also happens. Tastes can make wonderfully positive and powerful memories. The Spam hits Raffi’s tongue, and his taste-bud cells send out messages to the insular cortex, and the smell blasts his olfactory bulb, which sits super close to the hippocampus, the brain’s memory hub, and from there, memories and taste and smell are all intertwined. One chunk of Spam, for Raffi, feels like home. And connection. It is that intense.

And Raffi is hardly alone.

Spam might be considered lowbrow. It might be mocked and disregarded by the oldest of my kids. But it is, arguably, the taste that binds our diverse Las Vegas community. Spam taste-memories cross experiences, ethnicities, race, social and economic class, and childhood upbringings. Rock climbers have it in their dusty vans at Red Rock. Indigenous people on remote rural reservations depend on Spam for those long periods between trips into town. And preppers, drawn to Spam’s wicked shelf-life, store it in Mojave bomb shelters and underground pantries. One prepper swore he’d eaten Spam 10 years past its “best by” date.

“It was fine!” he assured me.

Even the most ardent non-cooks can cook with it.

“My mother was a terrible cook,” one friend messaged me. “We actually looked forward to sliced Spam with onions. It was one of her best recipes!”

Yet it also has enough Vegas sex appeal to enjoy at a bar, playing the slots. The hip eastside Starboard Tack cocktail lounge offers a riff on the Merienda sandwich — grilled Spam, pimento cheese, and spicy adobo pickles, served on squishy Filipino rolls.

Indeed, Vegas Filipinos are big Spam fans, and have been since canned meat came to the Philippines as World War II rations. A friend talks about her mom dredging chunks of Spam in brown sugar, frying, and serving them with eggs and Japanese rice, the sweetness a contrast to the infamous saltiness of the Spam.

And Danela, the Filipino server at Pokemon: Poke Bowls & Sushi Burritos, on Valley View and Spring Mountain, has a bunch of Spam stories. We got to talking about their Spam Burrito, a mish-mosh of Japanese, Mexican, and Pacific Island influences that includes Spam, egg, crab, greens, pineapple, fried onions, and teriyaki mayo wrapped in nori.

Danela told me Spam is a luxury item in the Philippines. It’s expensive. “If you made a Spam dish for your guests,” she told me, “they would be very happy.”

In local Japanese homes, cooks make goya chanpuru, a bitter melon stir-fry well known in Okinawan cuisine. It’s simple to make — bitter melon slices, a special hard form of Okinawan tofu, Spam, and eggs. The bitter taste of the vegetable is the perfect pairing for the salty, fatty Spam. “Restaurants try to make it fancy with pork chunks,” one Henderson mom told me, “but it’s better as it’s originally intended, with Spam, because that’s how I remember it.”

Budae-jjigae, known as “army stew,” is still made in local Korean kitchens. It came into existence during the Korean war, when starving Koreans were forced to sift through American army base trash for scraps. For a budae-jjigae, think enoki mushrooms, silken tofu, spring onions, garlic, kimchi, and red pepper powder, alongside army-base cast-offs like baked beans, Spam, hot dogs, and slices of American cheese.

If you are a Korean granddaughter, you might remember the taste of budae-jjigae as simple comfort, but if you are a great-grandmother who lived in Korea during the war, the taste-memory might be one of fear and deprivation. Same dish, powerfully different memory-evoking tastes.

At Roy Choi’s Best Friend at Park MGM, that plays out in real-time. Jake Leslie, Best Friend’s GM, explains that when large Korean families eat itaewon, Choi’s take on buddae-jjigae, they often have different experiences along generational lines. Younger Koreans love the thick, stewy mix of greens, corned beef hash, sausage, fish cakes, Spam, lil’ smokies, grocery store ramen, and herbs in a scorching but comforting tomato-based sauce. But older Koreans remember it as soup, not stew. Ingredients cooked in water or broth. Meager, not hearty. Taste-memory is so critical to how we experience food.

Buddae-jjigae is also an excellent example of how cooking food can be a transgressive and revolutionary act. A cook can take food borne of war and hardship, poverty, and struggle, reinvent it, raise it up, and turn it into something that reflects the cook and the eater. Every happy family meal with Spam redefines it and creates new generations of taste-memories. As I write this, I realize Spam is a lot like Vegas itself — born of hardship and struggle and made into something beautiful, loved by many, looked down on by snobs, misunderstood by naysayers.

Perhaps it’s Hawaiians who have the most enduring taste-memories of Spam, and have done some of the most beautiful and defiant things with it. Hawaiian restaurants offer iconic dishes like musubi, a spin on onigiri that puts a cooked slice of Spam on rice, held together with a piece of nori.

You can order your Spam Musubi at a casino restaurant, like Aloha Specialties in the California, or a smaller, no-frills eatery like Island Styleon Sahara, or with kimchi at Pacific Island Taste on Charleston. There is Loco Moco, rice and Spam smothered in brown gravy, topped with a runny fried egg, at Born and Raised. There’s the Green Eggs and Spam at Served in Henderson, eggs fried in green Thai butter and grilled Spam with garlic rice. And there’s Hawaiian-inspired Spam in coffee shops like Vesta, with its Hawaiian Benedict Sandwich: a runny egg, cheddar, and Spam topped with Sriracha hollandaise; and the Mahalo Special at Public Us, two farm eggs over Portuguese Sausage Spam with rice and house-made kimchi. 

Here on the Ninth Island, Spam brings a special taste memory. As with my son, Raffi, it’s of a first home. “OMG! Where do I start?” asks local artist Eddie Canumay. “Some people think Hawaii’s Spam obsession is a joke. But it’s for real.”

“We lived in the country, “ he told me, “in an old C&H sugar factory town. Before I could remember, I ate spam cooked all ways, mixed into any Island cuisine recipe that called for meat.”

As in Korea, war shaped Hawaiian taste. Eddie’s grandmother recalls Spam was the only meat they could get during World War II. And with Hawaii so expensive, it’s still an affordable, in-demand option today.

Hawaiians eat about 5 million pounds of Spam a year, about six cans a year for ever single person in the state. It is so coveted that Waikiki hosts Spam Jam every year, a festival celebrating Hawaiians’ adoration for canned meat. And drug addicts, looking for cash and acknowledging the unlimited demand for Spam, have created a Spam black market and retail theft ring in Honolulu.

Eddie talked about Spam saimin, a Spam-laden noodle soup that is even on some Hawaiian McDonald’s menus, as well as fried-Spam sandwiches, and the one dish that reminds him of home more than any other — diced Spam, fried with canned peas and carrots, in tomato sauce, and served over Japanese white rice, a dish that seems to have originated in the Philippines, known as Pork Guisantes.

“Everything floats on the tomato sauce,” he told me. His father made this dish for him his whole life. It’s his childhood.

“That was country living back then,” he said, mixing talk of food with island life and his childhood, all inseparable from each other. “Dirt roads, no street lights, no nothing. Just the sound of waves crashing on the sand at night.”

And the taste of the food.

“Spam,” he says, “reminds me of home and my childhood.”