40 Fun Facts About Spinach

The belief that spinach is an outstanding source of which mineral has been called an academic urban legend?

Iron is no more plentiful in spinach than in many other vegetables. The mix-up is often blamed on a misplaced decimal point, though that tale is doubtful too.

MIT engineers embedded carbon nanotubes in spinach leaves in 2016 so the plants could detect what in groundwater?

Explosives leak chemicals called nitroaromatics, and when the roots draw them up the leaves glow in infrared, prompting a small computer to email a warning.

Scientists stripped spinach leaves of their cells in 2017 and grew human tissue from which organ on the veined remains?

Heart cells beat on the leaf scaffolds, and one researcher said the idea came when a spinach stem reminded him of an aorta.

Which comedian played a Popeye who hates spinach until the final fight in Robert Altman's 1980 musical film?

Robin Williams starred opposite Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl; in the finale Bluto force-feeds Popeye a can of the stuff, which proves to be the bully's undoing.

Which explorer's crew on the Endeavour picked and pickled the greens now called New Zealand spinach to fight scurvy?

James Cook was the first to document the plant, and the botanist Joseph Banks later carried its seeds home to Kew Gardens.

In World War I, French soldiers weakened by blood loss were given which drink fortified with spinach juice?

Wine carried the juice to the wounded; spinach had been a familiar food in France since the 14th century, when it arrived probably by way of Iberia.

Which country grew 92 percent of the world's 31 million tonnes of spinach in 2024?

China grows far more than anyone else; the United States came a distant second in 2024 with about 1 percent of the world crop.

Spinach growers in Crystal City put up a statue of Popeye in 1937 in which US state?

Texas growers credited the sailor with making their main cash crop popular, and Crystal City still bills itself as the Spinach Capital of the World.

In a popular legend, spinach dishes are called Florentine after the home city of which 16th-century queen of France?

Catherine de' Medici supposedly brought her chefs and a love of spinach from Florence to Paris, a tale that food historians have debunked.

In his first comic-strip story in 1929, Popeye got his luck not from spinach but by rubbing the head of which bird?

A hen named Bernice, a magical Whiffle Hen, supplied the luck that let him survive being shot; spinach was first credited for his strength in 1931.

Spanakopita, the Greek pie of spinach wrapped in thin phyllo pastry, is usually filled with which salty cheese?

Feta is the usual filling, though a version with no cheese at all is eaten across Greece during religious fasts.

Palak paneer, cubes of soft cheese in a thick purée of spinach and spices, is a dish from which country?

India gives the dish its name: palak is the word for spinach in Hindi and several other languages, and paneer is the fresh cheese.

The Japanese side dish goma-ae, often served as a spinach salad, takes its name from a dressing made with which seeds?

Sesame is goma in Japanese, and the dressing usually adds sugar and soy sauce; versions made with green beans are also common.

Which brunch classic turns into a Florentine when a bed of spinach takes the place of the usual cured meat?

Eggs Benedict becomes eggs Florentine when spinach replaces the cured meat, and eggs royale when smoked salmon does.

A 100-gram serving of spinach supplies about four times the daily value of which nutrient, needed for blood to clot?

Vitamin K takes its letter from Koagulationsvitamin, the name its Danish discoverer Henrik Dam used for the clotting it makes possible, and leafy greens are among its richest sources.

Which bacterium in bagged fresh spinach sickened about 200 people across the United States in 2006?

E. coli of the dangerous O157:H7 strain was traced to a single 50-acre farm, where cattle and wild pigs roamed close to the fields.

Which US state grows most of the country's spinach, far ahead of second-placed Arizona?

California grew about three-quarters of the national crop in the mid-2000s, when bagged, triple-washed leaves and baby spinach were driving sales.

Which vegetable joins spinach in a popular hot, cheesy dip that is sometimes served in a hollowed-out bread bowl?

Artichoke is the other main ingredient of the classic dip, which is usually bound with cream cheese, sour cream or mayonnaise.

The classic American spinach salad of the 1970s is wilted slightly by a hot dressing made with which meat?

Bacon dressing served hot was long poured over dandelion greens in Germany, and the spinach version likely began among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Which name, shared with a crinkly-leaved cabbage, do growers give to spinach varieties with dark, wrinkled leaves?

Savoy spinach looks and keeps better than smooth-leaved types, which are grown for canning and freezing because they are easier to clean.

Lutein, a yellow pigment plentiful in spinach, gathers in the macula, the central patch of which part of the eye?

The retina's macula takes its yellow colour from lutein and a related pigment drawn from food, and the pair absorb excess blue light much as sunglasses would.

The English word spinach, borrowed through Old French, is usually traced to aspanakh, a word in which language?

Persian lands are thought to be where the plant was first grown, some 2,000 years ago, long before the name reached Europe.

Which people brought spinach to Sicily and Spain and made it a common vegetable around the medieval Mediterranean?

Arabs brought the plant west, and in 12th-century Seville the agronomist Ibn al-Awwam called it the chieftain of leafy greens.

Spinach belongs to the amaranth family, along with beets, chard and which protein-rich seed crop of the Andes?

Quinoa is not a grass but a pseudocereal, a broad-leaved plant whose seeds are boiled and eaten like grain.

Frozen spinach went on sale in Massachusetts in 1930 in a 26-item trial run by the company behind which brand?

Birds Eye is named after Clarence Birdseye, whose quick-freezing patents had been bought for $22 million a year earlier; peas, berries, oysters and fish were in the trial too.

Which animation studio, also home to Betty Boop, made a can of spinach Popeye's trademark in its 1930s cartoons?

Fleischer cartoons had the sailor gulp down a can whenever he was in trouble, and American spinach consumption rose by a third during the 1930s.

Which B-group nutrient, vital in early pregnancy, was first isolated from spinach leaves by American chemists in 1941?

Folate takes its name from folium, the Latin for leaf, because it was found in dark-green leafy vegetables.

Which substance in spinach, also found in rhubarb leaves, hinders the body's use of calcium and is reduced by blanching?

Oxalic acid is found in smaller amounts in crinkly-leaved spinach than in smooth-leaved kinds, and rhubarb leaves hold about 0.5 percent of it.

People taking which blood-thinning drug are told to go easy on spinach because the leaves can counteract it?

Warfarin works by blocking the clotting nutrient that dark leafy greens are full of, so a large helping can undo part of a dose.

Water spinach, the hollow-stemmed Asian green also called kangkong, belongs to which family, like the sweet potato?

Morning glory is the family of this fast-spreading green, which grows so freely that the USDA lists it as a noxious weed in the United States.

The self-styled world's largest can of spinach is a green water tower painted with Popeye in Alma, in which US state?

Arkansas is home to a cannery that once packed more than half of America's canned spinach, which is why Alma also calls itself the Spinach Capital of the World.

Antoine's of New Orleans denies using spinach in the green sauce of its 1889 oyster dish named after which tycoon?

John D. Rockefeller, then the wealthiest American, lent his name because the sauce was so rich; the dish was invented when the restaurant ran short of snails.

Spinach plants are either male or female, and their tiny green flowers are pollinated by what?

Wind carries the pollen from male plants to female ones, an arrangement botanists call dioecious and one that is unusual among vegetables.

Until 2003, botanists placed spinach in the Chenopodiaceae, a family named after the foot of which bird?

Goose tracks are what the leaves of these plants were thought to resemble; the family has since been merged into the amaranths.

Borani, a chilled salad that legend names after an ancient queen, combines spinach with which dairy food?

Yogurt was the favourite food of Queen Pourandokht, the story goes, so her chef created a string of dishes that mixed it with vegetables.

Pkhali, a Georgian dish of minced spinach, beets or beans, is always bound with a purée of which nuts?

Walnuts ground with garlic, vinegar and herbs are the one ingredient every pkhali shares; restaurants often serve the spinach, beet and bean kinds together.

Which old cottage-garden green with a royal name is also known as Lincolnshire spinach and poor-man's asparagus?

Good-King-Henry may owe its name not to a monarch but to the German Guter Heinrich, Heinrich being a traditional name for elves and household spirits.

Spinach appears as spynoches in The Forme of Cury, compiled around 1390 by the royal kitchen of which English king?

Richard II is named in the headnote of the best-known copy, a scroll, and the work is among the oldest surviving collections of English recipes.

Which Himalayan kingdom's ruler sent spinach seeds as a gift to the emperor Taizong in the 7th century?

Nepal's Licchavi king Narendra Dev made the gift, which court records date to 647; the plant was not native there either, having come from further west.

Spinach is also the name of a synthetic molecule of which type, built to mimic green fluorescent protein?

RNA strands named Spinach light up green when they bind a small dye, letting biologists watch RNA at work inside living cells.