Did the general consumption of spinach in the US increase during the time when Popeye became popular?

About six months ago, I answered a question on whether Popeye's spinach consumption was meant as a public service announcement. To sum that up, the creator of the cartoon took his own initiative in creating Popeye's spinach eating habits, but there was much American concern about child malnutrition in the 1920s. To quote from the earlier post:

[There are many] examples of Popeye editorialising about the goodness of spinach, for example this from July 1931:

"Special letter to me children frens – Dear kids – the reasin why I yam so tough an’ strong is on account of I has et spinach when I was young – An if you youngstirs wants to be helty like me ya got to eat yer weeds like yer maw sez – yers trulie, Popeye."

Laura Lovett argues that there was something of a crisis of child malnutrition in the early 20th century, and that Popeye's food advice was made with this crisis very clearly in mind. A report in 1907 had found that about a quarter of children were underfed; a separate report found that over half of African-American children in Mississippi in the 1920s were malnourished. This was a big deal in the American press at the time - Lovett claims there were over 50 articles about this in 1922 alone. The 1920s was also an era where there were increasing efforts at educating people about things like vitamins and what proper nutrition consisted of; it was in this era, according to Lovett, when the catchphrase "eat your vegetables, there are children starving in [insert country here]" began to be used as a public health message. So it was unsurprising, in this context, that E.C. Segar would have gotten Popeye to eat spinach - someone who reads the papers likely would have been aware that kids needed more encouragement to eat 'good' food.

The effect of Popeye in particular cannot be easily teased apart from the role of these other public health campaigns in the US, as there was an in general increase in the amount of fields being used to farm vegetables in this era as a consequence of the health campaign. Lovett does quote the following statistics:

According to shipping summaries of the time, in 1915 so little spinach was raised for wholesale trade that it was not worth noting. By 1928, there were 48,530 acres of spinach being raised.
A five year study was done in Fargo between 1923 and 1928 which showed a ten-fold increase in the consumption of spinach in that period as a result of public health messages being delivered by teachers.

Popeye was introduced as a cartoon character in print in 1929 and did not eat spinach in the cartoon until 1931, so Popeye did not influence the growth in spinach consumption in 1928. What this tells us is that spinach consumption was already being promoted heavily by public health organisations, and that Popeye eating spinach was merely an extension of this - nobody who had listened to the public health campaigns would be surprised that Popeye was eating spinach, and in a way, this was the idea.

In order to figure out spinach consumption in the Popeye era (as opposed to 1928), we can look at a USDA food consumption study of the North and West of America in 1936 (one of the first studies like this they did, unfortunately - we don't have USDA data from the 1920s); the average family in this study consumes .25 lbs of spinach per week compared to .29 lbs of celery, .78 lbs of carrots and .96 lbs of lettuce (in contrast, white families in the South East ate .08 lbs of spinach, and 'negro families' in the South East ate .04 lbs of spinach). By 1948, the quantity in pounds in the US as a whole was .29 lbs of spinach, compared to .58 lbs of celery, .92 lbs of carrots and 1.46 lbs of lettuce. This generally suggests that spinach consumption had risen somewhat across the board but fallen compared to other vegetables (edit: a previous version of this post had incorrect and less complete information, which /u/majromax and /u/thepromisedgland correctly pointed out).

In other data, the 1940 USDA census of agriculture shows a massive increase in the acreage devoted to spinach from 1919 to 1929, and its value in dollars, and a levelling out of sorts between 1929 and 1939:

Year	Spinach acreage	Spinach production value in dollars
1919	10,027	$1.715 million
1929	58,110	$7.392 million
1939	69,255	$5.416 million

In contrast to this data from 1920-1940 showing an increase in spinach production, statistics collected by the USDA Economic Research Service in 2007 shows a slow decline in the per capita use of spinach from 1940 (~3.75 pounds a person annually) to 1983 (~1.5 pounds a person annually). I'm not certain how the per capita use of spinach was calculated for this statistic exactly; it's worth noting that a weekly consumption of .29 lbs of spinach per family would be something like 15 lbs annually, which, if you assume a family of four, essentially works out to be about 3.75 pounds a person.

Popeye film shorts were produced between 1933 and 1957, and a further televised series was produced between 1961-1962. While there is perhaps more of a decline in spinach after 1960, the general trend between 1940 and 1960 is indeed a decline, despite the prominence of the Popeye cartoon film shorts. This suggests that Popeye's pleas to children to eat more spinach ultimately came up against the bitter taste of spinach cooked poorly and didn't win the battle over American taste buds. To which I can only really say that I yam disgustipated.