Popeye myth: Spinach misconception

I was eating nuts when my colleague remarked, “Nuts for a nut. Perfect.”

I offered him some: “Take it. Peanuts for monkeys. Perfect.”

We laughed and he continued, “So you had spinach-cheese burger for breakfast!”

“How did you guess?” I was amused.

“You vegetarians cannot look beyond spinach. Where else will you get strength from?”

“You are wrong,” I told him. “The portrayal of Popeye the Sailor Man as physically strong because of his love for spinach has been proved to be erroneous.”

“Really?” he looked surprised.

I told him what I read on Net: German scientist Emil von Wolff misplaced a decimal point in an 1870 measurement of spinach's iron content, leading to an iron value 10 times higher than it should have been. This faulty measurement was not noticed until the 1930s.

“Thank God. I am never amused of spinach,” he said.

“But why are you against spinach?”

His answer: “While travelling on local trains in Mumbai, I had noticed slumdwellers using fields close to tracks as open toilets. And many such fields had spinach grown on them.”