Back in 1959, a guy named Arthur Meyerhoff and his business partner Leon Rubin launched a product that would permanently change how Americans cook breakfast. PAM — which, by the way, stands for “Product of Arthur Meyerhoff” and not some fictional domestic goddess — hit kitchen shelves and basically never left. More than sixty years later, it sits in millions of pantries across the country. But most people spraying it into their skillets have no idea what’s actually coming out of that nozzle, or why it sometimes behaves in ways cooking oil never would.
Not just oil
Here’s where things get a little weird. If you assumed PAM was just canola oil in a pressurized can, you’d be wrong. The spray contains three main ingredients: oil, lecithin, and — wait for it — butane or propane. Yes, the same propane your neighbor uses on his Weber grill. These gases act as propellants, which is the industry term for the stuff that forces the oil out of the can in a fine mist. Without them, you’d just have a sealed can of oil with no way to spray it.
Lecithin is the second non-oil ingredient, and it’s a fat found naturally in soybeans and egg yolks. Its job is to act as an emulsifier — it helps the oil spray evenly and creates that nonstick coating on your pan. It’s the reason PAM works better for greasing a muffin tin than just dumping oil in there and swirling it around. So lecithin is doing the heavy lifting, and the propane is doing the pushing.
The FDA classifies all of these ingredients as GRAS — “Generally Recognized as Safe” — so they’re not banned or restricted. But “generally recognized as safe” is one of those phrases that sounds reassuring until you think about it for more than four seconds. It’s worth your time to at least know what you’re eating, even if the government says it’s fine. Especially when it involves lighter fluid adjacent chemicals.
The flavor problem
Most people who use PAM regularly will tell you it doesn’t taste like much. And that’s kind of the point. Cooking sprays were never designed to replace a good glug of olive oil on a salad or a generous pat of butter in a cast iron skillet. They’re supposed to be invisible — a thin barrier between your food and the pan. That’s it.
But some people notice a slightly chemical flavor when they cook with PAM, particularly in baked goods or eggs where there’s not a lot of other seasoning to mask it. This comes from the propellants and emulsifiers doing their thing. If you’ve got a sensitive palate, you might pick up on it. Most people don’t. Still, if your scrambled eggs ever tasted a little “off” and you couldn’t figure out why, that gold can on your counter might be the culprit.
PAM has tried to address this over the years by releasing flavored versions — butter, olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, and even an organic extra-virgin olive oil spray. They also make a baking-specific version that combines oil with flour. These taste a bit better than the original, though “a bit better” is doing some generous work in that sentence. None of them are going to fool anyone into thinking you used the good stuff.
Calories are sneaky
One of PAM’s biggest selling points has always been the calorie angle. Look at the nutrition label and you’ll see something wild: zero calories per serving. Sounds great, right? Except a “serving” of PAM is defined as a one-third-of-a-second spray. One. Third. Of a second. Nobody does that. Nobody even thinks about doing that. You pick up the can, you spray for two or three seconds, and you move on with your life.
So the calorie count on the label is technically accurate but practically meaningless. A more realistic spray — the kind you’d actually use when cooking — adds real calories to your food. Not a massive amount, but enough that calling it “zero calorie” feels like a stretch. It’s the same trick you see with certain breath mints and sugar packets, where the serving size is manipulated to hit that magic zero on the label.
That brings up another thing worth mentioning. Nutrition experts have cautioned against using PAM as a total replacement for butter and oil. Those traditional fats add real flavor to your food, and if you strip them out entirely and rely on cooking spray, you may end up craving richer, fattier foods elsewhere in your diet to compensate. The better approach is to use real fats in moderation and pull out the PAM when convenience truly matters — like greasing a bundt pan with all those annoying ridges.
Exploding cans, seriously
In 2019, things got ugly for PAM’s parent company, Conagra Brands. Eight people filed lawsuits claiming that PAM cans had exploded during normal use, causing severe injuries. We’re talking third-degree burns. Blindness. Real, life-altering stuff. The cans — pressurized with flammable propellants, remember — were allegedly detonating when exposed to heat near stoves.
A Conagra director named Dan Hare responded by saying that “when PAM is used correctly, as instructed, it is a 100-percent safe and effective product.” Which is the kind of corporate statement that probably didn’t land well with the people who’d been hospitalized. There’s a warning on every can about keeping it away from heat and open flames, but how many people actually read the fine print on their cooking spray? Exactly.
The flammability issue is real. Because PAM contains propane or butane, spraying it anywhere near a lit burner is dangerous. And storing the can next to your oven or on a shelf above the stove — which, let’s be honest, is where a lot of people keep it — can be risky if temperatures climb toward 120 degrees. The takeaway: treat PAM less like a condiment and more like a can of WD-40 when it comes to storage and use around heat. Which is a strange thing to say about something you put on food.
Tricks beyond the pan
People who’ve been using PAM for years probably already know the obvious stuff — spray the pan before eggs, spray the muffin tin before batter. But PAM has some surprisingly useful applications that go beyond the standard nonstick routine. For instance, if you spray the inside of a measuring cup before pouring in honey or molasses, the sticky stuff slides right out instead of clinging to the sides. That alone might justify keeping a can around.
Along the same lines, spraying a box grater with PAM before grating cheese makes cleanup dramatically easier. The cheese slides off the metal instead of getting packed into every little hole. You can also spray a knife or spatula when working with something particularly gooey — think caramel, marshmallow, or melted chocolate. Some people use PAM to keep parchment paper from sliding around on a baking sheet, and others spray it on avocado halves to slow down browning.
There’s even the substitution angle. Some recipes call for brushing oil onto bread, vegetables, or meat before cooking. PAM can handle that job and supposedly delivers similar results. Whether it performs identically to a brush of good olive oil is debatable, but in a pinch, it works. The real value of PAM isn’t that it’s better than regular oil — it’s that it’s faster and less messy. And sometimes that’s enough.
Don’t spray everything
If you own nonstick cookware — and most American kitchens have at least one Teflon-coated pan — you should think twice before reaching for the PAM. Cooking sprays can leave a residue on nonstick surfaces that builds up over time. This residue is nearly impossible to scrub off completely, and it gradually degrades the nonstick coating. So the very product designed to prevent sticking can actually make your nonstick pan worse at its one job. That’s irony for you.
If you have a soy allergy, PAM is also a no-go. Many versions contain soy lecithin, which could trigger a reaction. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to overlook because most people don’t associate cooking spray with allergens. But it’s right there on the label if you look for it.
And then there’s shelf life. A can of PAM lasts about two years before the oil inside can go rancid. If you’ve had the same can sitting in your cabinet since before the pandemic — and honestly, a lot of people probably do — it might be time to toss it. Keep it somewhere cool and dark, away from the stove and any heat sources. Because a rancid, flammable pressurized can sitting next to your oven is exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t end well. PAM is useful. PAM is convenient. But PAM is not something you should stop thinking about once you bring it home.
