Beets

A fearsome vegetable

I feel like beets are an intimidating and polarizing food. People seem to either love or hate them—but rarely are ambivalent about them. As a child, beets were downright revolting to me, most likely because the only time I encountered them was either when they were the technicolor-red pickled chunks in an otherwise-monochromatic salad or were one of the mystery vinegared/spiced veggies on a holiday tray. Gag me. Why is it that preserved produce was so gross when I was a child? Did I not give it a chance? Was it presented by adults with questionable taste? Are pickled vegetables just made differently this century? Did my taste-buds evolve?

So many beautiful cut glass dishes have held so many unfortunate crudités.

My first foray into the world of beets came from my college roommate’s mother’s legendary 3-day diet. It was the summer of 1990 and Wanda’s diet was our playbook for bikini-season weight loss—although let’s be real, having an age that started with a 2 was the biggest player in the relative ease of dropping a few pounds. The diet we followed was a Xerox copy of a copy and had a hallowed spot on the front of our Cloverhurst Condo fridge. It involved some interesting foods…I remember boiled eggs, dry toast, unadulterated canned tuna, a slice of cheddar cheese, 5 saltines, and hot dogs. I mean, seriously, hot dogs? I also distinctly remember one day’s dinner calling for a certain quantity of canned beets. I had literally never willingly consumed a beet before. On a scale of 1-10 where dirt is 1 and chocolate cake is 10, canned beets register around a 2. But that summer, y’all, we found ourselves irresistible to members of the opposite sex. We had attention from boys like never before. We figured it must have been the beets and so week after week we gagged down the canned morsels with our hot dogs & saltines saying each time, “Beets = Boys!”

This is NOT our copy of the diet but it looks a lot like it.

I don’t know when I quit resorting to the 3-day diet, but I know that I abandoned the consumption of beets at the same time. I pretty much forgot about them until we moved outside of Asheville, NC and I became a stay-at-home-mom who developed a fixation with eating local vegetables. Not in a weird Unabomber kind of way, or like today’s internet influencer ”look at me” kind of way, but in a Y2K-GenX-Neo-Hippie kind of way that fit into the vibe of the area. I was slow food before I even knew about slow food. I frequented the farmers’ stands and markets, learned how to can food, and we joined a CSA. One week our box had a huge bunch of beets in it. I came face to face with my biggest challenge to date because even my adventurous-palate kids might not eat an oddly colored food that tasted like dirt. (An aside: later I got turnips in the box and I realized that I had met my match…some veggies always taste like dirt.) So I looked up a recipe—in a book, y’all this was 2006—and roasted thin slices of those ruddy roots with olive oil, salt, and rosemary and there were no leftovers. The great thing about little kids is that they don’t have preconceived notions about things they have never been exposed to, so I told them in an excited, gleeful voice that we were having BEETS and to my surprise, roasted beet slices became a much celebrated regular side dish. And, I have to admit, it was pretty cool when my kids would publicly profess their love of beets—much to the surprise of all adults around. Yeah, I’m THAT mom…smirking with gloating superiority…the mom of kids that love beets.

You would think that with all this beet consumption that I would be well aware that the dye from a red beet is not always digested, and that I would be prepared for its usual reappearance in the potty the next day. This is more of a PSA than a TMI. Y’all, let me just pause to note that the onset of hormonally-induced midlife health anxiety has made me notice things I used to simply ignore. On one particularly high-cortisol morning, I glanced in the toilet after going pee and saw that the water was very dark pink—and it was not that time of the month. Cue an immediate, full-blown panic attack. With my spousal voice of calm and reason away on a business trip, it seemed perfectly logical that I had a severe case of acute hematuria and was likely near death—or at the very least, beset with serious illness.

OMG y’all, who knew that eating beets WITH their greens could lead to extra-red pee?

The nerds that study betalain pigment knew. Apparently it’s oxalic acid from the greens that inhibits the pigment metabolism and leads to the blood-red commode water. So there you go. Add this to the list of things you know now that you didn’t know you needed to know.

I have no evidence to support that eating beets makes you more physically attractive, and urge caution regarding anything pickled or spiced on a cut glass dish in the South. But roasted beet slices are delicious! Don’t fear the beet, just proceed with caution.