Posted on: Wednesday, April 27, 2005

TASTE
Spinach reigns

By Candy Sagon
Washington Post

We've become a nation of Popeyes, if you remember that famed spinach-eating cartoon character who believed he was strong because "I eats me spinach."

We are eating huge amounts of spinach — five times more fresh spinach than we did in the 1970s and the highest levels since the 1950s.

Popeye ate his spinach straight from a can to give him strength before he pummeled his nemesis, Bluto. Americans today have all but abandoned the can for fresh spinach. (Editor's note: One exception is Islanders, who like to use canned spinach in place of lu'au leaf for convenience and cost savings in making laulau.)

According to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, annual consumption of all kinds of spinach — fresh, frozen and canned — jumped 66 percent in the decade between 1992 and 2002. Canned spinach slipped to a minuscule portion of the market, but fresh spinach has exploded.

U.S. per-capita consumption of spinach has reached 2.4 pounds a year, USDA researchers said in a January 2004 report. This is small compared with some other vegetables — fresh tomato consumption is almost 18 pounds per person, for example — but still a huge jump considering that, in the bad ol' days of 1975, we barely choked down 5 ounces of the vitamin-rich, dark green leaves.

What's driving the growth is the popularity of those plastic bags of triple-washed spinach in the supermarket and, in particular, the "explosive growth in ... baby spinach." Baby spinach increasingly shows up in salads at restaurants, salad bars and at home, says the government.

Spinach has undergone such an extreme makeover that 56 percent of readers surveyed by the food magazine Bon Appetit ranked it as their favorite vegetable, beating out popular such choices as asparagus and broccoli. The survey, summarized in the March issue, asked 10,000 readers to rank a dozen vegetables in terms of preference, according to Tanya Steel, New York editor of the magazine.

"This is the seventh time we've done the survey, and spinach, by far, rated as the top favorite. For years, it's been asparagus. We were surprised — this totally bubbled out of nowhere."

Spinach growers were delighted as well — but not all that surprised.

Maggie Bezart of Ocean Mist Farms, a major grower of spinach in central California, says the 80-year-old company has seen a steady surge in demand for fresh spinach, particularly in the past five years. "We have increased our spinach production between 7 and 15 percent a year because of the demand for high-quality spinach," she says.

Baby spinach, with its small, flat, tender leaves, was the key to the rebirth, she believes. "Once baby spinach came out, people started eating it fresh, not cooked," Bezart says.

A cool-weather crop, spinach is planted in the late fall and early spring and is harvested until the summer heat sets in in colder growing areas. But California-grown spinach is available year-round in supermarkets.

Spinach's popularity nationwide began creeping upward in the '80s, with the popularity of salad bars and pre-washed bags of lettuce.

But what really made the difference, say Bezart and others in the industry, was the technology to wash and pack fresh spinach without damaging the easily bruised leaves. Pre-washed spinach was a boon to busy cooks who didn't like the hassle of rinsing the dirt and grit from fresh spinach, but flat-leaf and baby spinach, in particular, needed gentle washing and quick cooling so they didn't turn slimy by the time they reached consumers.

"When the wash line improved, spinach improved," Bezart says.

Some spinach now is washed and packed right in the field, says Daniel Sumner, director of the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center in Davis.

California currently supplies two-thirds of the country's fresh spinach (Arizona and Texas supply most of the rest) and has been at the forefront of fresh spinach marketing and technology. "We even get the elementary schools here to grow spinach," Sumner says. "You can talk about kids not liking spinach, but they like eating a salad of spinach they grew from seed."

Technology also is changing the demand for the traditional varieties of spinach. The three basic types are savoy, with crinkly, curly leaves, typically sold in fresh bunches; semi-savoy, which has slightly crinkled leaves that offer the crisp texture of savoy but are not as difficult to clean; and flat-leaf, which has smooth, spade-shaped leaves.

Because it is easiest to wash, flat-leaf spinach has become the dominant variety grown and sold on the West Coast. Bezart thinks that trend soon will spread across the country.

"I think you're going to see more flat-leaf spinach sold east of the Mississippi," she says. "There will still be consumers who prefer curly-leaf, but you'll see more turning to baby and flat-leaf spinach. We don't even see curly spinach in stores out here (in California) any more. It's all flat-leaf."

Making spinach easier to use has helped increase consumption, but consumers also know it's good for them, Sumner says. "The word's gotten out that spinach has important micronutrients," he says.

Recent research has found that spinach is packed with antioxidants, including beta carotene and lutein, which may promote eye health. Spinach is also an excellent source of vitamins A and C, plus such minerals as folate, manganese and iron. Although Popeye didn't know it, some of the iron in cooked spinach is blocked by the production of oxalic acid that occurs during heating. To get the most out of the iron in cooked spinach, nutritionists advise adding some vitamin C to your meal — a squirt of lemon juice, or some oranges or strawberries for dessert — to increase the amount of iron the body can absorb.