Some bravery as a side dish

4) Lunch meat. And not even all lunch meat, because many lunch items justify themselves.

Sliced turkey breast is faultless. A decent salami is a thing of beauty. A good headcheese can be a pleasure, though one for the open-minded.

Spam gets a bad rap, largely undeserved. (Fun Spam fact du jour: The six billion cans of it yet produced would encircle the Equator 15 times over.) Other chopped hams are harder to justify — they mostly seem like a waste of good ham — but Spam has style.

No, the subset of luncheon meat we're thinking of is the stuff that's unsavory for no reason than that it simply isn't made to be better.

Bologna isn't de facto bad, for instance; make it well, slap a fancy name on it like “mortadella” and suddenly it's a delicacy. Yet there is much bad bologna in the world.

Luncheon stuffs with the word “loaf” in them have a high bar to clear for respectability. Olive loaf, especially, comes to mind — in part because olives and pimientos aren't so cheap anymore as to make us believe there's huge cost savings by using them as filler. It seems even more improbable that it's done for taste or texture. Ditto pickle loaf. And spiced luncheon loaf is an idea that has outlived both its original utility and its appeal. It's probably time to retire the very phrase “luncheon loaf.”

After all, we live in a world of such wonders that the U.S. Army was able to produce a sandwich that's shelf-stable for three years. Can't we chalk some of these lunch products up to necessity, and embrace our glorious modern age?