Oh So Colson

Ah - I can’t believe that my blog got spammed! Ah…ridiculous. Whenever I think of the word spam..I always think of that nasty canned meat stuff being thrown randomly, literally, against or into an email inbox..and now a blog. I really don’t like that stuff. However, whenever I hear the word or read it I’m reminded of the Monty Python song “Spam”…and the nasty Canadian version of the product called ‘Klik”. Once when I was doing fieldwork in northern Ontario we took a can of this stuff as part of the ‘desperation food stuff’. This was the collection of food that we had if we ran low on stocks while we doing fieldwork …either because we’d eaten everything since our appetites had increased or we’d lost some through a canoeing accident. It was normal for us to only eat meat for during the first 24 hours since meat doesn’t survive for very long outside of a fridge (turns nasty and stinks). Anyhow once we’d eaten the meat we’d eat the food we brought in terms of what food stuff went bad first (we were in the bush for up to three weeks)…so fresh veg, eggs, cheese..were eaten in the first week or so. Then we went on dry goods which were re-hydrated with water (plenty of that around since we were always camping beside water on a beach or the shores of a river bank). So meat by the end of week two was an item that we thought wistfully about with those colleagues were also carnivorous types rather than vegetarians. We’d talk endlessly about what we’d intend to eat first when we arrived back ‘amongst civilization’…i.e. a town or village which had places which sold food. Several of us would go for a steak and a place where there was an ‘all you can eat salad bar”. We’d joke about being able to dive into the salad bar at one of these restaurants….and how delicious that first bite of a medium rare steak would be. Anyhow one time we couldn’t cope with the idea of not having meat for supper…since the last time we’d eaten meat was two weeks before. We remembered that we had ONE can of ‘pseudo spam’ as we called Klik and figured that it must be okay. So, as we canoed back to the beach where we were living on that trip we all..thought about the idea of eating that meat..and joked that we’d have to ‘file and sharpen our incisor teeth’ come closer to leaving the file just to appreciate meat more. Well, we’d barely landed on the beach, pulled in the canoes, and thrown our backpacks in our tents when we’d rushed to the part of the beach where the ‘kitchen’ was and dug through one of the large canvas food bags for the tin of Klik. We found it…and all of us looked gleefully at the tin while one of us opened it up. All of us were salivating at the thought of eating some protein rich substance….and Klik just couldn’t be that bad. It looked okay in the picture on the label that wrapped the can! But as the metal peeled away, using that free open attached to the base of the can, the horror of that substance inside the can showed itself to what it was..ugh. It smelt dubious and looked revolting. We recoiled in horror back from the person with the can and all stated that we couldn’t eat it. We figured that we couldn’t waste it since we’d spent a buck or so on it…and had carried it into the bush. Hence it had to be eaten by someone. So, the dog who was with us was deemed the worthy recipient of the can’s contents. We figured that he might like it since he’d had nothing but dry dog food for the entire trip and he might like it. So, we placed the Klik can’s contents on the ground for the dog. ….but he sniffed it tentatively…backed away and looked at us in disgust. Clearly, the dog wasn’t under any circumstances going eat the Klik. If we weren’t eating it neither was he.