Spinach, in the Primal Diet framework as taught by Aajonus Vonderplanitz, occupies a deeply paradoxical position. On the one hand, Aajonus acknowledged that spinach historically had been considered one of the most important, most revered vegetables in the cultural and nutritional imagination, the food most associated with muscular strength, iron-rich blood building, and physical power, epitomized by the American cartoon character Popeye. On the other hand, Aajonus did not place spinach among his regularly recommended foods, and he explicitly identified certain chemical properties within spinach that made it something he did not often recommend.

The subject of spinach in Aajonus's teachings cannot be separated from the infamous E. coli 0157:H7 contamination event attributed to California spinach fields, which Aajonus investigated personally and in conjunction with other doctors and biochemists. His investigation of that event, and his conclusion that the E. coli strain in question was man-made, never found in nature, and planted deliberately, became one of the most politically charged narratives in his entire body of teaching. The spinach E. coli incident, as Aajonus analyzed it, was not a food safety event. It was, in his view, a deliberate attack on the public's trust in organic farming, natural fertilizers, and the natural food supply itself, engineered to benefit chemical agriculture corporations such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical.

Thus, any complete entry on spinach in Aajonus's framework must cover two distinct subjects simultaneously: first, his actual assessment of spinach as a food with specific chemical properties that limit its usefulness; and second, his extensive documentation and analysis of the spinach E. coli political operation and what it meant for the future of food freedom.

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Aajonus explicitly identified spinach as containing oxalic acid, and he characterized this oxalic acid content as a significant concern, specifically because oxalic acid functions as an antibacterial substance. In Aajonus's framework, this is a serious drawback, not a neutral or beneficial property. His entire understanding of health rested on the necessity of bacteria, both internally and in the foods one consumes. Bacteria, in his view, are not pathogens but rather the essential workforce of biological function. Foods or substances that are antibacterial therefore work directly against the body's ability to maintain its microbial health.

When a person in a workshop asked him specifically about oxalic acid, asking "What about oxalic acid? You mean in spinach?", Aajonus confirmed this is exactly what he was referring to, and stated clearly: "That's not a thing I recommend very often. Because that's an antibacterial."

He further extended this concern by noting that beets also have an antibacterial property, but specifically through their high hydrochloric acid content concentrated in the beet root, not the beet stalk. He differentiated: the beet stalk does not carry the same concentration of hydrochloric acid that the beet root does, and the beet root's hydrochloric acid is what produces that destructive effect. With chard, which came up in the same exchange, he indicated that chard does not have the same degree of reaction as beets, suggesting that the severity of antibacterial action varies across these related greens, with spinach identified primarily through its oxalic acid content.

In the same passage, Aajonus noted that garlic also has a heavy antibacterial reaction, and that for this reason garlic should be used only as a flavoring, not consumed in large quantities. This comparison is instructive: Aajonus placed spinach in the same conceptual category as garlic in terms of antibacterial impact, and his recommendation was similarly restrictive. Just as he said of garlic that you should use it "as a flavoring," his position on spinach was that it is not something he recommended very often.

Aajonus repeatedly referenced the cultural claim that spinach is the greatest iron-rich, muscle-building food, epitomized by Popeye the cartoon character. He used this cultural belief as a key element of his political analysis, arguing that the power of the spinach E. coli narrative lay precisely in the fact that it targeted the most symbolically important vegetable in the American nutritional imagination.

In one passage, he said directly: "Spinach used to be the one where you took for power and you cleaned the blood and you cleaned the liver and the spleen and the pancreas. Great substance, spinach." This statement reflects a more nuanced view, that spinach does have real biological functions related to blood cleansing, liver cleansing, spleen cleansing, and pancreas cleansing. He acknowledged these properties even while simultaneously noting that oxalic acid limits his willingness to recommend it frequently.

This is an important complexity: Aajonus described spinach as having genuine cleansing value for the liver, the spleen, and the pancreas, while also flagging its antibacterial oxalic acid content as a reason not to use it often. These two positions coexist in his teaching without being resolved.

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While Aajonus did not extensively detail the specific processing states of spinach in the way he did for animal foods, his entire framework universally opposed cooked vegetables as a useful food for humans. Cooked vegetable juices, including those that might be derived from spinach, are listed among the substances to avoid, particularly for people with enzyme-mutation issues related to red and processed foods. One passage from We Want to Live lists "cooked vegetable juices (canned or bottled)" among substances to avoid in that context, implying that spinach juice or any green vegetable juice consumed in cooked or processed form is not beneficial.

His reference to eating "a few vegetables like lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, parsley and young spinach with a few ounces of carrot juice" indicates that when spinach does appear in his personal dietary description, it appears as young spinach, consumed raw, as part of a mixed vegetable approach alongside raw fat-containing foods like cucumbers and tomatoes classified as bland fruit.

The specific qualifier "young spinach" is notable. Aajonus does not elaborate in these passages on exactly why young spinach is the preferable form, but in the broader context of his teaching on vegetables and greens, younger, less mature plant matter tends to have less concentrated chemical compounds, in this case, presumably less concentrated oxalic acid, than fully mature leaves. This is consistent with his overall caution about spinach's antibacterial properties: younger spinach would carry a lower dose of those properties.

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The most extensive commentary Aajonus provided regarding spinach sourcing concerns the E. coli contamination event, and his investigation of it tells us a great deal about how he approached the question of where spinach comes from and what may or may not be on it.

Aajonus described personally going to the California spinach fields that had been identified as the source of the contamination outbreak. He went with five other doctors and biochemists. They collectively took approximately 87 to 89 samples, he specified "I'll say 87 because I know 87 samples at least", from multiple locations including the manure fields, the areas around the contaminated fields, and the fields themselves. Not one sample yielded a single instance of E. coli 0157:H7.

He also went specifically to the fields at night, in one account he describes having "raided the field at night while all the feds were sleeping, supposed to be guarding it", suggesting that his investigation was thorough and his sampling was real and personal.

Critically, Aajonus noted that all of the fields blamed in the spinach contamination event were chemically fertilized fields, not organic fields. He stated explicitly: "All of the fields that were blamed were chemical fertilizers, chemically fertilized fields, not organic fields." This is a foundational point in his analysis: the contamination event that was being used to attack organic farming and manure-based fertilization was, in his finding, actually associated with chemically fertilized fields.

While Aajonus did not give spinach-specific washing instructions, he described his general approach to washing all vegetables and fruits: he would use water with one to two tablespoons of milk added to a quart jar, soak the produce for approximately 20 minutes, and then perform a vibrating, shaking motion, compared to a jeweler's cleaning process, to dislodge surface contamination. He noted: "I always wash everything. I don't trust anybody even if it says organic."

In an early training context, when discussing pasta, Aajonus was asked about pasta varieties containing spinach. His response was clear and categorical: "No spinach, no carrot, no artichoke. None of that." He specified that pasta should be just grain, unfortified, off-white, not bleached, or potato. The addition of spinach to pasta was not acceptable in his framework, presumably because the spinach is cooked in that context and thus loses its enzymatic value while potentially contributing problematic compounds in a cooked form.

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Aajonus's universal instruction regarding vegetables, and this applies to spinach when it is consumed, is that raw fat must accompany any vegetable consumption. He described this at length in the context of fruit and vegetable eating: raw unsalted cheese, raw unsalted butter, avocado, peanut oil pressed below 96 degrees Fahrenheit, raw cream, any of these can serve as the fat buffer. The fat is required, in his framework, to prevent the alkalinizing effect of vegetables from overwhelming the digestive system, and to provide a medium through which fat-soluble vitamins and compounds can be absorbed.

In We Want to Live, when he describes consuming "young spinach," it appears in a context alongside carrot juice and other foods that are typically consumed with fat-containing components like cream or butter according to his standard protocols.

Aajonus consistently indicated that the best way to extract nutritional value from vegetables for human consumption, given that humans lack the alkalinizing digestive tract necessary to break down raw plant matter, is through juicing. He stated that from whole vegetables, humans get only approximately 3% of the fat or protein total combined. "That's nothing," he said. Vegetable juice bypasses the problem of cellulose digestion and delivers the vitamins, enzymes, and minerals in a form the human body can actually absorb.

It is not explicit in the passages whether Aajonus recommended juicing spinach specifically, given his concern about oxalic acid. His statement that he does not recommend spinach very often and his identification of it as antibacterial suggest that it would not be a primary component of a green vegetable juice blend, which he typically built around 80 to 90% celery with additions of parsley, carrot, and other vegetables.

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This is the most extensively documented subject Aajonus addressed in relation to spinach. He returned to it repeatedly across multiple workshops, seminars, and newsletter writings, and his account remained consistent throughout with only minor variations in specific numbers or designations. The following represents a full compilation of every element of his account.

Aajonus consistently referred to the strain as E. coli 0157:H7, also written in some transcripts as 015787, 15787, 157 H7, or 0157H7, all referring to the same organism. He investigated this strain personally and came to a definitive conclusion: it does not exist in nature. It is a man-made, genetically engineered organism.

His evidence for this conclusion came from multiple lines of investigation:

First: Field investigation with multiple researchers. Aajonus went to the California spinach fields identified as the source of the contamination, accompanied by five other doctors and biochemists. They collected approximately 87 to 89 samples from the fields, from the manure in and around those fields, and from related locations. Not one sample yielded a single 0157:H7 organism. He stated this in multiple workshops: "I couldn't find one 0157:H7" and "Not one 0157:H7 did we find."

He extended this search beyond the spinach fields: "I've searched for that creature everywhere in nature, and I can't find it in California." He also investigated factory farms, since some alternative health practitioners like Dr. Mercola blamed factory farms for 0157:H7, and he could not find it there either: "I haven't been able to find one there either."

Second: The fractionation test. When Aajonus obtained a sample of 0157:H7 to study, he subjected it to the normal enzyme fractionation process used to study E. coli, a standard laboratory method for separating and analyzing the organism's components. Normal E. coli fractionate predictably when subjected to this process. The 0157:H7 sample did not fractionate. Instead, it exploded. In his words: "When I used the normal enzyme to fractionate it, the fluid to fractionate it to study it, it didn't fractionate it. It exploded. Just like it was man-made." And in another account: "When I look at the 0157:H7 under a microscope, it looks like a genetically modified version of an E. coli." He described it as having "an enzyme on it" that caused it to "split in two", "a spliced man-made bacteria."

Third: The source of the only available sample. The only sample of 0157:H7 that Aajonus was ever able to obtain for study did not come from nature. It came from a university professor, specifically in Northern California, associated with the University of California at Davis, who was conducting research on the organism. When Aajonus asked this professor where he had obtained his culture, the professor told him that the sample had come from the FDA/CDC. In one account, Aajonus describes a friend in the biology department at Davis who confirmed: "They didn't get theirs in nature. Their sample came from the FDA." In the newsletter, Aajonus wrote: "The only 0157:H7 I have been able to observe is a culture given to me by a university professor who got his culture from the FDA/CDC."

Aajonus asked the professor directly: "Have you found it anywhere in nature? Anywhere out there?" The response was: "Well, we've had reports of it." Aajonus pressed: "No, I said have you found it anywhere? Did you find it in the spinach fields?" The response was: "Well, we were allowed to go." Aajonus interpreted this as confirmation that the organism had never actually been found in the natural environment by anyone doing genuine independent research.

He also noted that his friend at Davis "may have lost his job because he helped me."

A crucial element of Aajonus's account of the spinach incident involves the jurisdictional behavior of the FDA. He described that when the contamination event was announced, the California county health departments and the state health department all moved in immediately to investigate. The next day, the federal government, specifically the FDA and CDC, arrived and expelled all local and state health department personnel. The federal agencies declared that because the spinach had crossed state lines, it was their exclusive jurisdiction.

Aajonus was deeply suspicious of this move: "Why wouldn't they all pull their efforts together if there was really a problem? Because the feds made this up." He argued that removing the local health departments, which he described as "all the good minds out there", prevented a genuine, thorough investigation and allowed the federal narrative to stand unchallenged. In his view, the expulsion of local authorities was not a procedural matter but a deliberate suppression of independent investigation.

He noted that the same pattern had occurred in another case (referred to variously as the "Edualla thing" or "E. dweli thing"): "They went in for the Edualla thing. When they went in for the spinach thing, the FDA came in, threw out the local health departments and said, we're handling this."

And critically, from his investigation: all of the fields that were officially blamed were chemically fertilized fields, not organically farmed fields, yet the entire narrative was structured to attack organic farming and manure-based fertilization.

Aajonus embedded the spinach incident within a larger argument about the historical and ongoing demonization of E. coli as a species. He argued that for approximately 40 years, the public had been told that E. coli was dangerous and pathogenic. Then, as more scientists investigated, it became clear that the human intestine is naturally loaded with E. coli, and that E. coli is a normal, necessary component of intestinal bacteria. This discovery undermined the decades of fear-conditioning. His conclusion: "They had to create a bad E. coli. And that's pretty sick."

The creation of 0157:H7, in his view a man-made, laboratory-spliced organism, served to rescue the narrative that E. coli is dangerous even after natural E. coli was rehabilitated by science. And the spinach incident was the vehicle for deploying this manufactured organism in the public consciousness.

Aajonus analyzed the choice of spinach as the vehicle for this contamination narrative as deliberate and calculated. The reasoning he described: spinach, above all other vegetables, carries the deepest cultural association with health, strength, iron, and blood-building power. For multiple generations, Americans had been told, through parents, through popular culture, and through the character of Popeye, that spinach was the ultimate health food. It was "the most important vegetable in all times to build blood and muscle."

By targeting spinach specifically, the architects of the contamination narrative achieved a specific psychological result: they killed Popeye. Aajonus used this phrase repeatedly: "What happens if then Popeye gets killed?" and "They killed Popeye last year with their spinach E. coli thing."

The effect of killing Popeye, in his analysis, was to attack the human and specifically American psyche at its deepest point of trust in natural food. He stated: "It starts mistrusting everything in nature. You mistrust the apple. You mistrust the spinach."

Once that mistrust was established, once even spinach, the food of supernatural strength, was demonstrated to be dangerous when grown with natural fertilizers, the psychological groundwork was laid for legislative action against manure-based and organic fertilization across the board.

Aajonus identified specific corporations as the primary beneficiaries of the spinach contamination narrative: Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and Gulf and Western. His argument was as follows:

If E. coli, a natural component of all fecal matter, which has been used as fertilizer since the beginning of agriculture on earth, can be successfully framed as a lethal food contaminant, and if the most beloved vegetable in America can be shown to be "infested" with E. coli from manure, then the logical legislative conclusion becomes: manure must be banned as fertilizer.

He stated: "If the legislation went in saying that all fertilizer, all manure could no longer be utilized to grow our food, who benefits? Monsanto? Dow Chemical? Gulf and Western? Because now, everything that's safe is a chemical."

He projected a timeline for this outcome: "It will be illegal for you to grow anything that isn't Dow and Monsanto fertilizer", and he estimated this would happen within 5 to 10 years from the time of those workshops, "unless some big changes happen."

He further warned: "They're going to call your foods dangerous. So the only way you're going to be able to survive on your own land and grow the things you want to be nourishing... they're going to count the whole thing's been set up."

The mechanism he described: "E. coli, we've been using manure as the main fertilizer on earth since earth had dirt and a creature to have fecal matter. It's on everything. All of a sudden you've got an epidemic from E. coli on spinach? I beg your freaking pardon."

In one particularly pointed passage, Aajonus drew a direct connection between the FDA's role in producing and distributing the 0157:H7 culture and the existence of biological warfare programs: "The FDA is the one that came up with this 0157:H7. Oh, then it's probably part of the war department's biological warfare" program. He noted that the FDA gave the 0157:H7 culture to the university at Davis for research, meaning the federal regulatory body that declared the contamination emergency was also the only known source of the organism in question.

Aajonus situated the spinach E. coli incident within a comprehensive framework of food-based fear-conditioning. He described the overall pattern: "The whole structure of making you afraid of your own body and bacteria and blaming bacteria for disease is the pharmaceuticals' way of controlling you."

He traced historical precedents: the pasteurized milk industry's creation of myths about typhoid and tuberculosis from raw milk. The 2007 spinach E. coli event. The January 2009 narrative blaming fresh home-garden vegetables for disease through rat larvae. Each of these, in his view, followed the same pattern: blame nature, blame natural organisms, create fear of the natural food supply, and drive people toward processed, chemically produced alternatives.

He wrote in his newsletter: "You continually condition the public to fear nature, blame many incidences of food-poisoning on E.coli. You blame every animal in nature for disease: Rats, cats, swine, dogs, and even bunny rabbits (rabies). You blame them for diseases that actually man has created and developed from his pollution. Then you blame E.coli for contaminating one of the most revered vegetables on the planet, spinach."

He also articulated the mechanism by which the food industry uses this bacterial theory to protect itself from scrutiny: "They do not want their additives scrutinized. They rejoice in the ignorance that predominates our health departments. They support the mythic bacteria-theory that imprisons our entire civilized world; this theory is mainly media and education-driven." Crucially: "Foods are rarely if ever analyzed for additives/chemical contamination including fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, hormones and genetically modified food allergens. The food industry controls the food market."

Aajonus did not shy away from the direct implication of his investigation. He stated: "Is this man-made creature being planted in society, hospitals and food to continue brainwashing us into believing our microbial nature is bad and that industrial chemical poisons are good?" He answered his own implied question with the conclusion: "Microbial 'pathogenic' activity in food does not cause food-poisoning or disease. Industrial agricultural chemicals, food additives and processing cause food-poisoning, period."

He described the entire sequence as: "Something very sinister is going on there. And if you look at the process, what's the latest process? Blaming spinach. Put Popeye in a cat coffin."

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