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(photo Source: literature) Writing | Su Chengyu

When it comes to Popeye, spinach must be mentioned, because no one knows that Popeye likes to eat spinach.

Photo Source: giphy, an American animation produced in the 1960s, each episode has less than 10 minutes, and the protagonist Bobby can always pull out a can of spinach from his ten-year-old sailor suit in times of crisis.

After opening the can in an unexpected way, pour the spinach into your stomach and immediately turn into a muscular man. No, it should be Superman. What to take off is pediatrics, swinging the great white shark's tail is a good beating is also casual.

Photo Source: giphy, after World War II, Americans have always regarded canned food as one of their staple foods, so it is not uncommon to put spinach in canned vegetables. Below is a picture of canned vegetables made in the United States in the 1950s, mixing carrots, potatoes, green beans and peas.

Photo Source: in the 1980s, the can brand Allens even took the famous Popeye as its endorsement and printed its profile picture on its own canned spinach. Popeye's name "Bobby" was directly used as the name of the product.

Photo Source: at that time, Alma, Arkansas, called itself "the spinach capital of the world" because it was home to Allens, the place where canned spinach was produced.

So why did Elzsig, the author of Popeye, use spinach as a source of strength? It's not broccoli, it's not tomato, but spinach?

Photo Source: in themaginalian1870, German chemist Wolf published a paper that pointed out for the first time that spinach contains so much iron that it is valuable enough to compare with red meat. The conclusion that spinach is rich in iron has been written into the most authoritative encyclopedia.

Seeger, author of Popeye, took advantage of this major discovery to introduce spinach into his work, which led to a 33% increase in spinach sales in the 20th century.

Photo Source: themarginalian but in fact, when Wolf was taking notes, he put the decimal point in the wrong place, so that the iron content of spinach was ten times higher than it actually was. He actually found that 100 grams of spinach contained about 3.5 milligrams of iron, but because of his mistake, the iron content of 100 grams of spinach was 35 milligrams.

In addition, in an 1848 spinach study, all the author Richard's experiments were based on undried, hydrated spinach, but later marked as air-dried samples in the paper. this leads to a confusion between dry weight and fresh weight (see below), so that the actual composition of spinach is magnified.

Tu Yuan: in fact, as early as 1937, someone re-examined Feng Wolf's numbers and found and corrected his mistakes, but spinach is still widely considered to be one of the most iron-rich vegetables, which may be Popeye's pot.

In the last century, advertisements and advertisements for "spinach is high in iron" can be seen everywhere in American newspapers, and it is also organic iron (nuxated iron).

Source: early children's books also included the knowledge of iron content in spinach. For example, the following is the illustration of the Child Health Alphabet first published in 1918: I stands for iron, found in spinach and eggs.

Photo Source: in 1981, the British Medical Journal published an article entitled "how the myth of iron-rich spinach has become an urban academic legend" demonstrates in detail how the spinach myth came from.

In fact, as early as July 3, 1932, in Popeye Comics, Bobby explained why he ate spinach: Popeye ate spinach because it contained vitamin A.

Picture source: Popeye cartoons, but in fact spinach is rich in carotene, vitamin C, vitamin K, various minerals (including iron), coenzyme Q10, etc., but not rich in vitamin A. However, spinach is rich in beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A.

Seeger, the author of Popeye, chose spinach as a source of strength because he knew how difficult it was for parents to get their children to eat vegetables, especially in an age when vegetables were completely ignored. As a result, he chose spinach as a cartoon form to convey to children that vegetables can enhance their health, so that they do not hate eating vegetables so much.

Seeger once used the mouth of Bobby in the cartoon to write a paragraph:

"Dear children, I am so strong because I ate spinach when I was young. If you want to be as strong as I am, you have to eat vegetables like your grandmother and become real Popeye."

Cover source: wiki

references

Https://www.researchgate.net/figure/alues-presented-for-the-iron-oxide-content-of-spinach-as-presented-by-A-B-Jacob_fig2_331556841

This article is from the official Wechat account: bring Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: everything.

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