Some Notes on Spinach

popeye spinachHe looked like a walking wart and sounded like an amphetamine-fueled bullfrog, but Popeye the Sailor, that deeply weird avatar of Depression-era America, descended from noble stock—namely, a bloodline founded by the Greco-Roman hero Hercules.

Like his legendary ancestor, Popeye drew his strength from the earth, not directly in the manner of Atlas but indirectly through the consumption of a nutritionally supercharged foodstuff. In Hercules’s case, that foodstuff was garlic, which, according to a Popeye cartoon of 1954, the hero sniffed in times of need, which occurred to him much more often than they do to the rest of us. Alas, his archfoe Brutus knocked him into a spinach field during one of their frequent brawls, and Hercules chewed the green stuff instead of sniffing the white stuff, and, well, the rest is history, at least of a sort.

It took a hero to convince children of my generation to eat spinach, for the usual way Spinacia oleracea came to the table was sopping wet and near-black, always tasting of the can in which it had been housed. It was nasty stuff, and Popeye had to cajole and lie and keck-keck-keck endlessly in order to make the sale. Even as a child, I inclined toward the view espoused by the great philosopher Groucho Marx: “This would be a better world for children if the parents had to eat the spinach.”

Still, Popeye’s detestable ploy worked. In the 1930s, when the cartoon first became popular, spinach consumption increased by a third. The fact that there was a depression going on and many people could not afford to eat as much meat as before may have had something to do with it, too. No offense to the good people of Crystal City, Texas, who long ago erected a statue to Popeye and declared their town to be the Spinach Capital of the World—an event that they’re celebrating today, November 12, the opening day of an annual three-day festival devoted to the green stuff.

spinachTwo millennia and more ago, the spinach capital of the world lay somewhere on the vast Iranian Plateau, where the plant grew in wild abundance. The people of the region knew a good thing when they saw it, and spinach, which they called esfenakh or aspanakh, figured prominently in the local cuisine.

Traders brought spinach to the Mediterranean, whose cooking has never been the same since. (Mix some freshly sautéed spinach with some red pepper flakes, olive oil, garlic, and the ear-shaped pasta called orecchiette, and your life will be changed for the better.) Italian traders took the plant to France, where it became the épinard of culinary fame. The French passed it along to their neighbors, even the ones they didn’t like. For their part, the Spanish planted spinach almost as soon as they landed in the Americas, and in time it was growing in profusion, the better to put Crystal City on the map and the inhabitants of those lands in better health.

And there’s no mistaking it; spinach is good for a person, even if its legendarily high iron content was the product of a slip of the pen. Which is to say: in 1870, it seems, a German chemist calculated spinach’s undeniably high concentration of ferrous oxide, but in transferring his figures from notebook to journal article he located the decimal point in the wrong place, making it seem as if spinach had ten times its true wealth of iron. For the next seven decades, spinach bore the rubric “miracle vegetable” in health manuals in many languages, and it took six decades for other chemists realize their colleague’s error and correct the figure.

By that time Popeye had been out doing his propaganda work, and anyway, few people were inclined to banish spinach from the table on account of a little typo. Happy Spinach Fest!

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Portions excerpted from Gregory McNamee’s Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food.

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