Spinach

I’ll sing about a vegetable your kids would never trust,
It’s got vitamins and minerals, it’s odoriferous.
Popeye the sailor used to eat it by the pound,
But now it’s put old Popeye in the cold, cold ground.
California spinach, how could it misbehave?
Did Bin Ladenite bacteria put Popeye in his grave?
We’ll smash Islamo-vegetables, wherever they arise,
And the immigrant potatoes with their beady eyes.”

Chorus:

And there’s horror in the collards, and terror in the kraut,
And the spinach gonna get you if you don’t watch out!

As we mourn the latest victim in this nation’s longest war,
We are smoking out the fascists in our fields and grocery stores.
We’re deploying special forces down on old McDonald’s farm,
To secure those clean, green pastures and bright red barns.
But there are foul, funky feedlots where the cows are forced to grow,
It’s the bovine equivalent of Guantanamo.
Our food supply’s transmogrified into a witches’ brew,
Which will lead us back to spinach in a verse or two. (Chorus)

There’s a bug in all our bellies, the scientists report,
Escherichia coli, you can call it E. for short,
It was part of our digestion, it was everybody’s friend,
But E. coli’s never gonna be the same again.
Now the cows are fed a diet that no cow had ever seen,
Succotash and bone meal, and tetracycline.
And the drugs are wreaking havoc on the bugs in Bessie’s cud,
Making mutant E. coli, and it’s up to no good. (Chorus)

When the cows do their duty, E. coli rides along,
Flowing from the feedlot to the scummy storage pond.
And it seeps into the aquifers and runs into the streams,
And it irrigates organic fields of spinach greens.
Are you a vegetarian? You think you’re so damn pure?
Your vegetables are growing in a puddle of manure.
And you wash them and you scrub them, but no matter what you do,
If you listen to the spinach, the spinach says, “Moo.” (Chorus)

Copyright © 2006 by Fred Stanton