JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1040                                                 

The category of the specialty meat, the meat that both is and isn’t meat, is one that holds a particularly high place in the religico-belief system of consumption in America—and particularly so in the historical American meat memory.  For it is here, in this very purply ad in LIFE magazine in July 1947 that we find a reminder for a meat product being sold as such, printed with the statement that the meat is being sold with meat in it, which is odd because it suggests the rejoinder that the opposite is true, too.

The ad is magnificent in its own special way, falling just short of  reading “Prem Meat: Now with MEAT!”.

The adipose-y Prem meat-like clone sprung from the mind of Elmer Gantry-looking Joe Hormel,  who I wrote about earlier in this blog under the title “Spam, Smeat, Spic, Prem, Mor & Arf: Food by Any Other Name”.   Prem was a Spam-like product, a waste-meat issue of food that was packaged as a molded solution for the lower-middle-class American family.  The belief in Prem and such things as meatfood must’ve been strong; I doubt that anyone who had the remotest imagination would have thought of it as an adhered-jell byproduct which nearly ended its life on the slaughterhouse floor waste grate before it was thought of as something that could be scrubbed off the metal grid, loaded with other extreme leftovers, loved up with coloring, solidifiers, sugars, preservatives and flavorings and then sold as an ingestable commodity.  The romance of Prem is lost if you drain it of its belief system and expose it as the salvaged refuse bin
material that it was. 

As a 20-year vegetarian I’m strangely attracted to these ads, just as I would be any other piece of quackery from the sciences or medicine. These odd meat things were fortified with splashy store displays and crisp metal packaging.  It certainly looked okay in the pictures; could digestive goodness be far behind?

The other bit that runs far and wide through LIFE that reminds Americans that the meat that they are eating is meat  , red meat, and the RED MEAT ads–these things are incredibly red, and big, and make quite the bloody splash considering that the ads were about 14 inches tall. 

Anyway, reminding someone that they were eating more of their memory than the actual thing itself seems as though it would’ve opened more dangerous doors to unsavory discussions rather than closed them–but close them they did, as the new-old memories posted by these ads seem to have worked their sensate magics.