Zach Nowak, a Bok Center Departmental Teaching Fellow, brought the canned meat product Spam to the first day of section for a course on American food history.

Spam, first created in the United States in the late 1930s and used to fuel troops during the Second World War, has since fallen out of favor, going the way of ersatz coffee as a food most people would probably rather avoid if given the choice. Today, Spam often conjures up associations of tastelessness and poor quality rivaled only, perhaps, by Dickensian gruel.

It came as no surprise to Nowak, then, when his...