Ancient Web: A 2001 Birthday Prank Became a Museum of SPAM-Shaped Meat

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Somebody once received 18 tins of luncheon meat for a birthday. The result was not a complaint to customer service. It was a website that attempted to document an entire species of rectangular canned food.

Visit the Guide to Spam-like Products.

The site's origin story explains that in October 2001 Roy A. Summers III played a prank on his brother for his fiftieth birthday. Roy bought 18 twelve-ounce cans of meat, from familiar Hormel SPAM to less familiar products such as Ma Ling, Dutch Colony, Winner Mountain, and Ziyad.

He scanned each can's six faces and emailed the images to his brother. The joke was that this was real spam in an inbox, not unsolicited advertising. The recipient was then expected to open the cans and report on them.

One more picture, of the meat itself

The brothers began organizing the scans into a webpage, using a black background to make the cans stand out. Then came the obvious seventh photo: the exposed loaf of meat. Each product received an orderly filename sequence, with letters for different views. When the project eventually passed one hundred cans, the system gained an extra leading zero.

The main gallery remains a vertical collection of photographs linking to larger images, with a surprisingly strict definition: rectangular, twelve-ounce, SPAM-like luncheon meat. The site is emphatic that ordinary corned beef is not the subject, even if the packaging looks similar.

The author says readers later helped contribute examples from places beyond his own shopping trips, and that the collection continued to grow. He also recounts recognizing an image from the site on a 2016 Rachel Maddow broadcast. Those are the site's own recollections, not independent metrics of fame.

After Roy died in May 2020, the page was dedicated to him. What began as a prank therefore also became a family memorial. The history page keeps his name, photograph, and account of how the joke turned into a shared collecting practice.

It is an unusually clear example of what the personal web could preserve: not simply an object category, but the precise sequence of obsession that made an ordinary person build an archive in the first place.

Browse the cans and read the brothers' origin story.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.