The Wild Wild Wild West of School Lunches #5: Popeye Where are You Now?

Spinach

I did not know until after college that spinach was a green leafy vegetable. My mother may have served it in a salad but I don’t remember. I remember spinach as an amorphous lump on a rectangular plastic yellow tray. In the eyes of elementary children the spinach served at school lunches in the 60’s and 70’s appeared to have already been digested. The lunch ladies (they were always lunch ladies back then) would plop a dark green mass next to your soggy hamburger and limp fries. Desert would vary but often it was a “fruit cocktail.” Fruit cocktails were most likely the first incursion of high fructose corn syrup into the American diet. 

On the  “colonial style”(just like the early colonists had?) television at home a well built smoking sailor named Popeye who was always battling a slightly brown skinned man with dark hair and a beard named Bluto pushed this canned glop onto American children as if it were ambrosia. Every time Popeye got into trouble he would dump the green swill down his throat and he would win the epic battle against Good and Evil again and America was safe from brown hordes. Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl looks through the hindsight of history to be suffering from anorexia. The fourth character, an obese man named Wimpy, subsisted primarily on hamburgers which. To make things worse, Wimpy begged for his burgers. “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." He always owed somebody money. Although we all watched Popeye and Bluto at least weekly few were convinced that the soggy green mass had anything to offer us. Few ever made the connection the comic strip’s producers wanted us to make. Spinach is good for you and hamburgers will make you into a fat cowardly mooch.

Olive Oyl reflected a bizarre cultural norm as well. She continually vacillated between the bad boy Bluto and the good boy Popeye. Many episodes featured Olive Oyl being kidnapped by Bluto for unexplained reasons and miraculously rescued by Popeye who could only do this feat with the help of canned spinach. Wimpy never rescued anybody. No wonder the boomers, the first generation to grow up on television, are so confused. We’re not sure what to eat and we have the highest divorce rate in history.

I think all these random thoughts in the wee hours of the morning when I sit down in front of my laptop to blither on about schools and health and how to get kids and staff to be healthier. Weighty issues indeed.

The messaging and marketing of the boomer generation produced the teletubbies they went on to reproduce. We have a lot of work ahead of us.