Here are three things about spinach that I've spent the last day and a half discussing:
- spinach can send emails
- spinach has an extremely high amount of iron
- spinach does not have an extremely high amount of iron, we only think it does because a German scientist fucked up a decimal point
Only one of those things is true, and if you asked 'is it leafy correspondence,' you win a prize. The prize is spinach.
The third point is what kicked off the entire conversation. L was adding noodles made with spinach to a broth that already had spinach in it, and I brought up what I thought was a fact: that in the distant past, a scientist wrote a paper with a misplaced decimal and that inspired the "spinach is a great source of iron" campaign and the creation of Popeye, noted sailorman. L was outraged at her entire life being a lie and made me look it up. I did, and then I was promptly outraged that my fact about the lie was also a lie.
The actual story is: we don't know why everyone insists that spinach has higher iron content than other green vegetables. It doesn't.
There's probably something clever to be said here about misinformation and how it spreads, especially when you hear something you want to believe is true. There's probably also something to be said about the importance of fact-checking and verification in all areas of our life.
Here's my key takeaway: spinach can probably do my job for me.
Citations:
- Spinach communications: https://news.mit.edu/2016/nanobionic-spinach-plants-detect-explosives-1031.
- Spinach myths: https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popeye_March_2010.pdf. (this piece is 34 pages long and worth it entirely for the fact that the subheading touches on the IRONY of the spinach myths)
- Spinach's iron content: https://www.compoundchem.com/2018/07/17/spinach/
this got me to look up the original paper about spinach nanobionics for the first time and while regrettably it seems to be closed-access1 the abstract points at some work that I find way more profound than the spinach e-mails, which involve implanted nanoparticles and an infrared camera: a pathway for genetically engineering tobacco that de-greens in response to a programmable stimulus (in their example, TNT — the idea being that you can seed a field full of mines or other UXO from the air, then isolate specific areas to focus on demining with aerial photography)
makes me imagine a perfectly square field of plants slowly expanding inward toward the center of the WIPP footprint over 10 millennia
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I know, sci-hub, but I’m in bed rn and don’t want to bother with that
