Canned Meat Products - where do you draw the line?

Having a quantity of Canned meat products for Emergency preparedness is very useful but the quality and the cost can vary quite markedly.

There is SPAM and there are some lower cost imitations offering the same salty fattiness, although the taste and texture consistency may vary quite a bit.

There is Canned Corned beef (mostly originates from Brazil), quality and taste can vary from something thats inedible to something that is acceptable even in a Sandwich with pricing that can vary from £1.50 to £3.00 a can in the UK.

Then there are canned hams and chicken. Again some are quite good usually over 85% ham/chicken content down to the barely 60% ham by content (bulked out with fillers and water etc). I have seen even seen 52% ham content!

We are now getting to the Canned meat balls and hot dogs and other unspecified meats such as Pates etc usually of the mechanically recovered chicken etc spinning in an industrial concrete mixer machine type. This I think is getting into real survival food territory. These products can actually be quite expensive for what they actually are and won't even compare to canned fish such as Tuna, Salmon, Pilchards, Mackerel and even Sardines or anchovies (although now I will now pay more for Atlantic sourced fish over Pacific) in quality protein bang for the buck.

Cost is important factor when bulk stocking a larder for preparedness, I would forget the cheap stuff and look out for the higher quality meats when on offer.

Overall though I would say the quality of canned meat products have slowly declined over the years.