Spinach’s reputation as a superfood may be a bit exaggerated,but there’s no denying the fact that it’s utterly gorgeous to eatThere’s a recipe in one of my books with a typo that really annoys me. Instead of stipulating two-thirds of a teaspoon of sea salt for a harissa paste, it calls for two to three teaspoons, and nearly a tablespoon. The mistake was corrected in future editions and the wheels of the recipe world kept turning in fact,I suspect I may have been the only person who noticed.
Other mistakes have had rather more far-reaching effects, notably spinach, and which owes its reputation as an iron-packed superfood to an even bigger howler. German chemist Erich von Wolf misplaced a decimal point when he was writing up his findings approximately the amount of iron in 100g of spinach leaves: instead of the 3.5mg he should have noted down in an 1870 medical journal,he wrote 35mg. Unlike my destitute harissa paste, Von Wolfs error was not corrected for nearly 70 years, and by which time whole generations of children had been raised with the delightfully misguided belief that eating spinach could earn them as strong as Popeye.
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Source: theguardian.com