• dead [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    11 days ago

    “is that ham processed? If it’s processed I don’t want it” Ma’am, that is an eleven pound whole slab of deli ham. It has no bones, fat, or connective tissue. It is an amalgamation of the meat of several pigs, emulsified, liquefied, strained, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy meat obelisk. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence. The fact that this ham monolith exists proves that God is either impotent to alter His universe or ignorant to the horrors taking place in his kingdom. This prism of pork is more than deli meat. It is a physical declaration of mankind’s contempt for the natural order. It is hubris manifest. We also have a lower sodium variety if you would prefer that.

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    11 days ago

    healthy kids love Hormel’s New and Improved 7 lb Ball of Ham.

    Throw it around like a medicine ball to work up an appetite!

    –

    you have subscribed to #Ham Facts.

    in the US, which itself contains a sizable portion of the Global Ham Belt¹, there are legal definitions for Ham.

    • Country Ham: most strict, most traditional and prestigious to ham aficionados. dry-cured over long months starting in winter. final product needs no refrigeration and is intensely salty. i like salty foods, but you can actually feel your blood volume increasing the pressure on your circulatory system. ok maybe not, but you’re going to want some water. kind of an apocalypse food, honestly. imperceptible moisture content, expensive per pound. some ultra traditional country hams can be priced very high per pound. jamon iberico is a super long dry-cure method from spain (18 months or some ludicrious shit) and the price per pound can range $50 - $200 USD per pound. also ludicrous.

    • Ham aka “City Ham” to Country Ham freaks: “wet-cured” (aka repeatedly injected with and soaked in a very salty brine), usually smoked and sweetened a bit too at the end. has to be cooked before it can be eaten, but generally cooked before sold to remove the moisture and make it kinda shelf stable. i would still keep it in a fridge. if you go to a deli and get ham sliced, this is what you’re getting: a city-ham that’s been smoked and cooked. Also, when somebody does an easter ham, this is probably what they bought. It is not a traditional ham, but rather it is an attempt to rapidly recreate the traditional product with modern methods so inventory can move to the plate instead of hang somewhere and actually cure.

    • “Ham With Natural Juices” is a “City Ham” that has 7-9 percent water added. A sus product invented by pork processors, first marketed as Ham until somebody was like, “you’re just filling the thing with water and charging people for meat by the pound.”

    • “Ham With Water Added” has up to 10 percent extra water. An even more sus product invented by pork processors. Similar to the above, but yet another attempt to sell people more water at meat prices.

    • “Ham and Water Product” may contain any amount of water. The true “who gives a shit” product probably invented by somebody who ended up with more money than god.

    ¹ the Global Ham Belt isn’t really much of a belt, but it is a series of regions in similar latitudes with accomodating climates allowing the conversion of whole pork legs into a shelf-stable food source, not requiring any refrigeration. you can imagine this was a big deal before modernity. the regions of the belt represent historic food cultures that have their own traditional methods to more or less achieve a similar product. sort of a covergent culinary phenomenon thing.

    • mickey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      I have a pack of Hormel salt pork that has been sitting in my refrigerator since the Biden administration, but there’s no expiry date on the package and I feel like that should be safe to eat. Frankly, not eating it would be an insult to all the ancestors that lived pre-refrigeration. These were some pretty solid ham facts, convergent evolution in foodways is fun to learn about with the ham belt.

      • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        it’s probably ok. sub 40F salted & nitrited industrial pork likely reduced microbial metabolism to near zero. if it’s been opened or allowed to warm up at some point, as a raccoon-type eater, i would chew it suspiciously while glancing around in a state of vigilance and await the consequences near a place i felt comfortable having sudden diarrhea.

        salt i an interesting food component. it’s the only rock we eat, and we need some to survive. it doesn’t show up in plants, but we can find it in the earth (and other animals). and it stops bacteria from doing its thing in high enough quantities. it makes everything taste more. and too much jacks up our circulatory system.

        there’s a kind of occasionally foodie douche book about salt that is otherwise totally fascinating. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. full of weird little trivia and grand narratives about how critical salt was to human culture since the earliest days of even pre-history. how tons of names of peoples and places are exonyms for “salt” given by peoples who traded for it and are no longer extant to people who controlled access. not to mention its relevance as a critical resource to the age of conquest and exploration, the salt packed barrels of “food” (the descriptions sound terrible - apocalypse food) that could allow crews to survive as they sailed great ocean expanses where nothing edible could be found and anything not packed in salt would be rotten. there’s a lot of covergent stuff around condiment flavors that come and go and come back again over time, appearing and reappearing in different cultures.

        Salt is common, easy to obtain and inexpensive. It is the stuff of kitchens and cooking. Yet trade routes were established, alliances built and empires secured – all for something that filled the oceans, bubbled up from springs, formed crusts in lake beds, and thickly veined a large part of the Earth’s rock fairly close to the surface. From pre-history until just a century ago – when the mysteries of salt were revealed by modern chemistry and geology – no one knew that salt was virtually everywhere. Accordingly, it was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

        • mickey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          TY for the effort reply here, I didn’t see it 'til an hour later and it was past my bedtime by then. That Salt book sounds very interesting especially the bit about naming. It’s funny that I certainly knew how critical salt and trade networks around it were historically, but I don’t think I’ve ever wondered why that is no longer the case.

          The salt pork has been held in constant refrigeration in intact packaging, and I was going to pressure cook it with some beans anyway, so I just might go raccoon style, and hopefully not Raccoon City style.