Here's a cartoon that's un-funny, if not downright incomprehensible, without a pretty extensive understanding of early Twentieth Century society. To begin with, you have to understand that good parenting, as of the early thirties, when the cartoon first came out, basically required that children be fed a diet that was as full of nutrients as possible. Childhood mortality has been very low for about fifty years now; thanks to plentiful low-cost food and childhood vaccines for a lot of major illnesses, we take it for granted that our children will grow steadily and healthily, from infancy through adolescence. This was not the case in the 1930's. My mother, for instance, who was born in 1937, caught rheumatic fever when she was five years old, and even after recovering, she remained sickly. Her reminiscences include stories about how her father moved the family to the country, so he could buy a goat, and she could drink the nourishing goat's milk to get healthier. She never looks at her old childhood pictures, but what she has to point out how thin and frail she looked, years after her bout with rheumatic fever.
But to get back to the spinach: Vitamins were, in the 1930's, still a rather new discovery. It's interesting, really, to read advice about healthy eating from before and after they were discovered (in the 1910's). At the beginning of the century, people were preoccupied with calories, understandably, in a world where the poor still went hungry, rather than, as nowadays, being overfed and undernourished. Ideal diets prescribed for children involved getting as many calories into them as possible. High-cream milk, white bread, butter, and hot cereal, were the recommended foodstuffs, all to be accessorized with sugar as necessary, to please picky appetites. I've always thought it must have been nice to be a child at that time. Imagine being encouraged to eat as much fresh-baked bread, preferably slathered with yummy, fatty butter, and washed down with milk so rich that it's half cream. Men preferred their ladies stout in those days too; really, there are reasons for calling them the Good Old Days.
Then around about 1914, vitamins were discovered. And all of a sudden it was the accepted thing that children should eat as many of them as possible -- And, if possible, plenty of minerals as well. Liver went from being a cheap and filling entree, to being a sort of nutritional slam-dunk for children, loaded with A and B vitamins. Spinach, was another one. As if life hadn't been hard enough for children already, what with the persistent risk of dying, from childhood illnesses we don't even remember nowadays, and family members going off to World War I and whatnot, now it became even harder. You want to know how bleak food became for kids after the discovery of vitamins? One of the popular candy bars of the thirties was called Tasty Yeast, which was basically vitamin-rich brewer's yeast coated in chocolate. Really. Imagine sitting down to a dinner of liver with spinach on the side, and for dessert, a yummy Tasty Yeast bar.
There's one more reason to be glad you live in the Twenty-First Century (if you needed one). At any rate, to understand the cartoon at the beginning of this post, you've got to understand how all-pervadingly normative spinach was as a children's food, in the 1930's. After that, you've got to understand a little about how various cruciferous vegetables were perceived:
Cabbage, you've got to understand, was considered just horribly vulgar and declasse. In 1984, a pervasive smell of cooking cabbage in apartment hallways is one of the details George Orwell uses to denote poverty. M.F.K. Fisher, in "The Social Status of a Vegetable", describes an extraordinarily ladylike woman she knew, who professed never even to have tasted cabbage, for fear she would be thought common.
Broccoli, on the other hand, had some class to it. It was a vegetable that had just recently been discovered, one that was still grown in small enough crops that it was expensive. Plus of course, one could serve it with hollandaise sauce, which added a little class to everything. Broccoli wasn't asparagus perhaps, but it was almost as good, a wonderfully trendy vegetable for an arriviste lady to eat -- And to serve to her little girl (who, in her turn, punctured Mama's pretensions wonderfully, by relating the hyper-fashionable vegetable on her plate, to plain old, ordinary, spinach.
There is still a class element to cruciferous vegetables, incidentally. Broccoli and cauliflower have lost their elegant image of course, now that they're grown and marketed in bulk -- In fact the last time I looked, cabbage cost more than broccoli. -- but there is still a hint of foodie-glamor to Brussels Sprouts. This is not, because they are difficult to grow or market. The Trader Joe's where I do my marketing sometimes gets shipments of frozen Brussels Sprouts, imported from Belgium actually, and they only cost 99 cents a pound, which leads me to suspect they grow them in bulk there at least. Here in the US however, it is their strong taste which keeps them from becoming widely popular. Let's face it, we Americans like foods that don't have much taste to them.
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