Holly Gibson, curator of the private Potted Meat Museum, recently took her first bite of Spam and declared it slightly salty, but mostly bland. “It doesn’t taste outrageously disgusting,” she observed. Baked dry on a Triscuit, the sliced square had darkened to a deeper, more forbidding shade than bright pink, fresh-from-the-can Spam, the smell of which, she says, compares unfavorably to cat food.
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She never got hungry enough to eat the ham, but carried it with her to several different apartments over the years. In 1992, on a beer run, she and a roommate were stopped in their tracks at the store by a bin load of Armour Potted Meat Food Product, priced to move at four cans for a dollar. Horrified yet fascinated by the main ingredient, “partially defatted cooked pork fatty tissue,” they took a can home and displayed it alongside the original ham.
At first she cheerfully accepted all brands, from San Pedro Jack Mackerel to Goya Beef Tripe Stew to Celebrity Sliced Bacon. Recently she’s become more selective, seeking out international brands and exotic flesh, and scorning “meatpeats,” unless the company has redesigned its packaging (she has three cans of Bryan Potted Meat Food Product, all with different labels). Many of her benefactors send her cans from trips abroad. Presently, she’s attempting to persuade an Asian foods wholesale distributor to send her some spicy goose-foot webs and smoked cobra. Meanwhile, she’s scouring ethnic groceries in search of goat in a can.
“I E-mailed that Mike guy,” she says of one of them. “I found his Web site about four years ago and was like, ‘Hey, I have this potted meat collection. Let’s be buddies.’ And then for a few minutes I had this sort of girlish notion like, ‘I wonder if Mike Epstein is my soul mate.’ He went to Harvard. He’s gotta be really smart. I’m just like, ‘Oh, an intellect from Harvard that collects meat! How dreamy! Oh, Mike Epstein and I are going to have this potted meat collection together. Wait until we tell our friends how we met and fell in love.’ And a couple months later he posted on his Web site a picture of himself and I’m like, ‘I’m not in love with Mike Epstein anymore.’”
