PROCESS 01: SPAM
Spam is love, spam is life.
Welcome to PROCESS, a ten-part series on processed food in which I discuss my favourite, much-maligned mainstays of the British shopping list. This is part one, all about Spam.
My paternal nana and grandad were as working class as it’s possible to get in deepest Lancaster. Mill workers from childhood, I remember visiting nana at work in Nisbet’s factory on North Road in the centre of town when I was very small, tubes of red and royal blue knitted sleeves spooling out of the machines, the smell of detergent and dye rising in the steam from her pressing table. She used to drink tonic water at her station, and wear a blue press-studded tabard to protect her elaborate 80s knitwear.
My nana’s kitchen is one of my fondest childhood memories. Brown and cream, it was hot with boiling potatoes in winter and open to the elements in summer, a colourful plastic strip curtain hung over the door to keep the flies out. I was under strict