Spinach
Spinach is a type of food that appears in select tins. Eating spinach provides 600 nutrition if blessed or 401–600 nutrition if uncursed[1] (much more than other tins) and increases your strength: "This makes you feel like Popeye!" ("like Swee'pea" if hallucinating; otherwise "like Olive Oyl" if you have sustain ability). Eating a cursed tin of spinach provides 201–600 nutrition but decrease your strength.
The amount of strength increase is as follows:[2][3]
| Current strength | Gain |
|---|---|
| 17 or less |
|
| 18–18/84 |
|
| 18/85 or more |
|
Cursed tins of spinach contain a “decaying green substance” (or “decaying substance” if you are blind).[4] If you decide to eat it, you lose the amount of strength you would otherwise have gained.
The use of spinach and its effects in NetHack is a reference to comic strip character Popeye, who gains incredible strength after eating spinach. That motif in turn was based on the popular conception of spinach as a superfood, which seems to have originated in a measurement error in a researcher's report on the iron content of spinach.
References
This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.
It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.6.1. Information on this page may be out of date.
Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-361}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.
