The Old-School Canned BBQ You Won't Find On Shelves Anymore

Some kinds of food just make sense canned. Soup? That's a classic. Beans? Perfectly logical. Even something like Spam, as unsavory as some may find it, feels right when it's squeezed into one of those rectangular tins. But other kinds of food are just all kinds of wrong. You probably won't find many people racing to try a cheeseburger in a can, nor will you find many people who'll pop open a whole canned chicken for a quick lunch. Despite all that, however, there's one barbecue item, although discontinued, that apparently wasn't as terrible as it sounds: ribs in a can.

Courtesy of Armour Star, a brand otherwise known for frozen meatballs, Vienna sausage, and corned beef hash (which you can make yourself in an air fryer for a great breakfast), ribs in a can were sold in the 1960s, back when our food companies were more concerned about "could" than "should". An advertisement from 1963 proudly offered two and a half pounds of bone-in ribs, complete with barbecue sauce. The problem was the price: two and a half pounds of meat is a lot, even if it's in a can, and that Armour advertisement admitted that those looking for cheap meat should look elsewhere. But if you have the money for ribs in a can, you probably have the money for ribs not in a can. Predictably, the product didn't last.

It's easy to mock the concept of ribs in a can — especially when it comes with a glossy magazine advertisement boasting about the use of "six worldly spices" (a turn of phrase we're sure sounded less ridiculous back in 1963). But there are some people who were around to try the ribs back when they were on the market, and they reported that it actually wasn't as terrible as you might think. Sure, the sauce was simultaneously bland and overpowering, drowning out those "worldly spices", but it was still better than canned ribs had any right to be. Said one enthusiastic Reddit comment, "I've eaten worse."

Speaking of Reddit, when the advertisement was posted there, more than a few people were intrigued by the notion of canned ribs, with a few saying they would "definitely try" them if they were still available — although one person did note that "they would probably be 30 dollars a can now". There are plenty of canned foods people stopped eating, from beef stroganoff to banana flakes — but maybe canned ribs could make a comeback? What d'you say, Armour?