I can’t say that I grew up eating that much Spam. In our house, it was a treat, something my mother would fry up when my father was out and serve — in the Filipino way — with rice. My mother was an excellent cook and believed in fresh ingredients, but Spam was an exception. Occasionally she would also roll out a can of creamed corn, adding milk and sugar to transform it into a kind of dessert. Once in a long while, a can of condensed milk would appear, and my sister and I would be invited to spread it on bread, or even eat it straight from the can with a spoon. As with so many of my mother’s parenting choices, the cooking of the Spam and its tinned brethren had a rich history that she chose not to share. But of these foods, the only one that I still like — and have passed on to my children — is Spam.

My kids eat Spam because I ate it, and I eat it because my mother ate it: two generations and counting of comestible nostalgia, a sort of legacy. Although its origin in the family is distanced by time, buried beneath the experience of the lazy weekend brunches of the succeeding generations, Spam functions as an unchanging, replenishable touchstone.

My friends find my love of Spam curious, despite the fact that Filipinos are known Spam lovers. Eating Spam is an enactment of my Filipino identity, but there are many other foods that would do the job more authentically — including balut, a fertilized duck egg, and dinuguan, a soup made from pig’s blood, neither of which I would be willing to eat today. Canned food in general is something I avoid, just as I avoid boxed mac and cheese or packaged ramen or anything you eat without the significant preparation it really deserves. I know that Spam — on a gustatory level — is hard to defend. On opening a can of Spam, one is first assaulted by a peculiar smell, reminiscent of Alpo; then, by that toxic pink color, heightened by a layer of glistening aspic; and lastly, by that jellyish texture, a texture best left to jelly. But sliced into slabs and fried to a crisp, served with garlic-fried rice and a sunny-side-up egg, it is delicious. If you wanted to, you could even eat it straight from the can, as soldiers did during World War II — and indeed, Spam’s presence in the rations of Americans fighting in the Philippines during that war is how it ended up on the Filipino culinary radar in the first place.