Pod Insights Gastropod Feel the Beet: The Most Fascinating Woman You've Never Heard Of About this episode For those who like its earthy flavor, the humble beet can do a lot for a salad or a soup. But could it help end slavery? In the 1800s, one woman believed it could—and she wasn't just any old woman. This episode, meet Lydia Maria Child, who wrote the first children's periodical magazine, the first New England historical novel, and one of America's first successful self-help books—all before she turned thirty, in an era where women were still considered property. This episode, we've got the fascinating story of why she bet big on beets, as well as how, more than a century later, Wolfgang Puck and Martha Stewart paired this much maligned vegetable with goat cheese to spark today's beet renaissance. Meanwhile, for the haters among us: is it possible to de-beet the beet, and get rid of that earthy flavor altogether? Listen in now as we meet the astonishing Lydia Maria Child, in the curious tale of the beet.
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Transcript 8,124 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:07 Speaker 00 So first taste this one and see what you think. This is like a sort of your typical, is this going to be too painful for you to do this?
0:16 Cynthia Graber? It's okay.
0:17 Speaker 00 I hate to ask you to do this.
0:18 Cynthia Graber? It's okay.
0:19 Speaker 00 This is really...
0:20 Cynthia Graber? I suffer for Gastropod.
0:21 Nicola Twilley? What are we forcing Cynthia to taste? What dreadful, horrifying, repulsive thing could we possibly be making her eat for your delight and entertainment?
0:32 Cynthia Graber? It is, dear listeners, a beet. Yes, I am one of those people who recoils from beet salad, borscht, basically anything dark red and earthy. I am indeed Cynthia, Cynthia Graber, and you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.
0:47 Nicola Twilley? Whereas I am Nicola Twilley, lover of beets, which I grew up calling beetroot, but really, I'll take it under any name. This episode, we get into why on earth anyone would hate such a delicious vegetable and how one beet breeder is aiming to change that.
1:03 Cynthia Graber? We are also telling the story of one of the most inspiring and fascinating women I'd never heard of before. She was an early radical abolitionist, a wildly successful novelist and children's magazine writer, and America's first sugar beet farmer.
1:19 Nicola Twilley? Yes, sugar beets are beets too, which was a surprise to me. Listen on and all will be revealed.
1:25 Cynthia Graber? This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.
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2:13 Speaker 04 Support for the show comes from TikTok. There is a scientifically documented correlation between listening to podcasts and curiosity. So since you're here, you probably enjoy discovering new things. One great place to indulge your curiosity is TikTok. Whether it's how to forecast volcanic eruptions, strange phenomena that the James Webb Space Telescope picked up near the beginning of time, or a literal deep dive on the ocean's deepest reefs, TikTok has a wealth of fascinating videos just waiting to be discovered. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
2:57 Speaker 04 Think of a beet. You're picturing something round, red, and sort of earthy tasting. And if you're Cynthia, you're also shuddering.
3:05 Cynthia Graber? But actually, you should probably be picturing something kind of conical and white, not red, and huge, like a foot long. This is the sugar beet. As it turns out, most of the beets grown today are sugar beets.
3:16 Speaker 00 The sugar beet is such an economically important crop in this country and in this world that the investment and research in sugar beet just dwarfs that of table beet. I'm one of the very few people working on the table beet in this country.
3:31 Speaker 04 Erwin Goldman is the only public beet breeder in the United States. It's a lonely gig.
3:36 Speaker 00 If you got all the people working on table beet research together in the world, we could probably meet in a small conference room.
3:42 Speaker 04 Erwin is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin. Like he said, he studies table beets. These are the kinds of beets you'd buy for your beet salad. He previously starred in our carrot episode because he also researches and breeds carrots. And carrots, unlike beets, do not have a cousin called the sugar carrot because carrots don't make enough of a particular type of sugar called sucrose.
4:02 Speaker 00 They make fructose and glucose. And I would say You know, sucrose is just simply fructosees and glucoses stuck together at a ratio of like almost one to one.
4:13 Nicola Twilley? Glucose, fructose, sucrose, they're all different kinds of sugars that plants make, but very, very few plants make a lot of sucrose.
4:22 Cynthia Graber? This matters when you're making table sugar. Glucose on its own is not as sweet as table sugar. Fructose, the kind of sugar that makes most fruit taste so sweet, it doesn't crystallize well, and then it also absorbs liquid, so it doesn't store well. Sucrose is a combination of the two, and it is just right, which is why we use it as table sugar.
4:40 Speaker 00 Many vegetables do make the fructose and glucose, the simple sugars, but don't really make the sucrose.
4:45 Nicola Twilley? But beets do, and sugar beets are fully one quarter sucrose.
4:49 Speaker 00 So they're like sugar factories. It's incredible.
4:51 Cynthia Graber? Sugar beets, table beets, there's a whole family of related vegetables, and they all originally come from a plant called the wild sea beet. It's native to the Middle East and all the way up through Scandinavia, but it seems like our modern beets hail from the shores of the Mediterranean.
5:06 Speaker 00 And it is an ancient plant cultivated largely, I think, for its foliage and for the leaves. So the Greeks, the ancient Greeks and the Romans, and even ancient Egyptian civilization, talked about the use of a vegetable beet, but almost exclusively as a leaf crop.
5:27 Nicola Twilley? Erwin says it seems as though sea beet leaves were mostly eaten in salad form, which he says makes sense based on his experience. He got some sea beet seeds, they still grow wild in the Mediterranean, and he grew them himself.
5:41 Speaker 00 It is a very different plant than the cultivated beet, with a leaf that is, has just a fantastic taste. I can completely see why people in the ancient Middle East and the ancient Mediterranean were interested in eating this. It's got a bright taste. It is almost, I would say, sometimes almost citrusy taste. It's a really nice texture.
6:03 Speaker 00 Almost crisp.
6:04 Cynthia Graber? In this ancient sea beet, the root is definitely not the star of the show. It's not large and round and juicy.
6:10 Speaker 00 If you pulled it up, it has just a sort of, almost like a deflated balloon and deflated almost all the way. So it's a slightly swollen, but very not succulent and almost fibrous in its texture. You can find it occasionally in a medicinal recipe. You can find it in some culinary recipes, but for the most part, it's foliage.
6:33 Nicola Twilley? When ancient people did use this fibrous root, they tended to boil it into submission first. Indeed, they would boil it for long enough that in the first century CE, the Roman poet Catullus used a boiled beet as an analogy for a limp penis.
6:48 Cynthia Graber? That doesn't necessarily make boiled beet sound super appetizing. And as we said, people preferred the leaves. But Erwin did find a couple of interesting ancient boiled beet root recipes.
6:57 Speaker 00 In almost like a stew or a soup. So that I would say is probably the most prominent, but there's a Talmudic recipe.
7:04 Cynthia Graber? The Talmud is the major Jewish rabbinic document that was written between the first and sixth century CE, between 1500 and 2000 years ago. And it basically explains in great detail how Jewish laws in the Torah are meant to be carried out. Anyway, apparently it also had some beet recipes.
7:20 Speaker 00 And there, there is a recommendation to celebrate a festive day with beets, the root, a large fish and garlic. Or there's a recipe where people have sliced the root of the beet, put leeks, coriander, cumin, wine, and then boil the whole thing down.
7:39 Nicola Twilley? The much more popular leaves of this ancient sea beet went on to have a glorious career as what we now know as charred. People kept on selecting for bigger and bigger leaves and we can buy those in bunches at the supermarket today.
7:53 Cynthia Graber? And over the centuries, people also took the sea beet down a separate plant pathway. They selected for larger and fleshier roots over and over again. The beet's root is particularly and kind of unusually well-suited to this type of selection.
8:06 Speaker 00 It has like tree rings. It's a plant that has multiple layers of xylem and phloem and xylem and phloem and xylem and phloem.
8:13 Nicola Twilley? Xylem and phloem are the two different kinds of pipe work in a plant. One moves water and minerals up from the ground. The other mostly moves sugars from the leaves. All plants have this pipe work, but only beets have it organized in concentric circles that all grow in rings at the same time, rather than year after year like a tree.
8:33 Speaker 00 And so when people domesticated that plant, they were able to select a large swollen vegetable because they were able to expand those layers of xylem and phloem, just like you would see in tree rings.
8:44 Cynthia Graber? You can see those lighter and darker rings in sliced beets today. Owen doesn't know how long it took people to continually select for fleshier and fleshier beet roots until they had nice, big ones.
8:54 Speaker 00 The first evidence that we can find is in the 1500s to find actual paintings or drawings where there's a true swollen root.
9:03 Nicola Twilley? These swollen, round, red beets are part of the painted decorative greenery around the edges of some frescoes in a villa in Rome, and they look exactly like something you'd find at the farmer's market today.
9:14 Cynthia Graber? In the same century, beets with swollen roots also appeared in herbals, which are books about useful plants. So it seems like the roots were finally pretty popular.
9:21 Nicola Twilley? And at this point, the beet took its starring role in what is possibly the most iconic beet dish of all: borscht.
9:29 Speaker 00 Originally, the borscht was not made with beets. It was made with cow parsnip, which is from the APAC, so related to carrot. And they would ferment the cow parsnip leaves and cook it with a broth and maybe some cream to make a very tart soup. But as the beets made their way into Eastern Europe and into other northern parts of Europe, there were alternatives to the cow parsnip, and beet was one of them. So that's when we start to see people making a red borscht, which has beets in it.
10:03 Cynthia Graber? A third line of this beet family was something called the mangelwurzel. It was a cross between chard and table beets. It was developed originally as animal food, and it's super hearty.
10:12 Speaker 00 It's not as beautiful as the vegetable. It's a little more fibrous than the vegetable, but is a large biomass and is certainly sweet. And people called that the root of scarcity because I think it was something that you could store and get through the winter. Maybe your livestock could get through the winter, or maybe even you could get through the winter eating this thing.
10:30 Nicola Twilley? And it was this less pretty, more animal food version of the beet that with a bit more help from plant readers eventually became the most popular and successful beet of all, the sugar beet.
10:43 Cynthia Graber? A French scientist in the late 1500s had figured out that beets have sucrose. As we said, this is the same form of sugar as is in sugar cane. And as you'll know, if you listen to our sugar episode, sugar from sugar cane was super popular, but still quite expensive in Europe because it had to be grown in a warmer climate and imported.
11:00 Nicola Twilley? The first sugar made from beets was pink, which sounds super pretty, but it wasn't as efficient to make as cane sugar because ordinary beets, whether they be table beets or these livestock fodder, mango, verzels, they don't have a ton of sugar in them. They're only five or 6% sucrose.
11:17 Cynthia Graber? So the budding investigation into beet sugar kind of fell by the wayside. It was curious, but it wasn't useful. But then a scientist in what's now Germany in the mid 1700s identified and purified sucrose from beets again. And this time it kicked off a race to develop a new commercial source of sugar.
11:34 Speaker 00 So of course, Europe was getting its sugar from the colonies. And the fact that a domestic plant like beet could make sucrose was extremely interesting to the Europeans.
11:48 Nicola Twilley? And that interest level got a real boost in the 1790s during the Haitian Revolution. The Haitians rose up in part because of the brutal conditions on French sugar cane plantations. And so that put a squeeze on Europe's supply of the sweet stuff.
12:02 Cynthia Graber? And then to make matters worse, in 1811, as part of the war against Napoleon, the Brits cut off his supply of raw sugar cane from French colonies in the West Indies, and French people were feeling a little desperate.
12:13 Speaker 00 And in fact, Napoleon offered a prize for anybody that could come up with a domestic source of sugar in Europe. As a way to get around this problem of the sugar from the colonies. And even though beet didn't win the prize, I mean, somebody got it for some other reason. It gives you an indication for how keen they were to have a domestic source of sugar.
12:32 Cynthia Graber? So European scientists began to focus a lot of energy on breeding sweeter Mengelevertzel.
12:38 Speaker 00 And so I would say that like breeding for high sucrose was one of the first sort of major scientific targets in modern plant breeding. It had a clear like economic goal there too. And so they were, they were successful at it. So today, a sugar beet could be 25% sugar. A table beet, though, you usually don't find them above 10 to 12%.
13:02 Cynthia Graber? Like Erwin said, the breeding worked. And so by the mid 1800s, Germany and France had become the centers of beet sugar production. Business was booming. European countries were producing a quarter of the world's sugar from those sugar beets up from zero only a few decades earlier.
13:17 Nicola Twilley? The next big thing in the sugar beet story involves the most interesting woman you've never heard of.
13:34 Cynthia Graber? This song that so many people my age heard in a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, it was actually written as a poem. And originally those kids were going to grandfather's house, not grandmother's. But it was written by a truly awesome woman named Lydia Mariah Child. She went by Mariah.
13:49 Speaker 05 Lydia Mariah Child was one of her generation's fiercest abolitionists and social reformers generally.
13:57 Cynthia Graber? This is another Lydia who actually goes by Lydia, Lydia Mollin specifically. She's a professor of philosophy at Colby College, and she just wrote an excellent new book called Lydia Mariah Child: A Radical American Life.
14:10 Speaker 05 And the amazing thing about just getting to know her is that almost no one knows who she was. And almost everyone can recite something she wrote, namely, "Over the river and through the wood to grandfather's house we go."
14:26 Cynthia Graber? Mariah's first connection to food was not beet based.
14:28 Speaker 05 She was the daughter of a baker. So she grew up thinking about food and how to make food, how to distribute food, how to market food. Her father was the creator of something called the Medford Cracker, which was actually exported to England.
14:47 Cynthia Graber? This is a point of pride for Medford, Massachusetts, which is right next door to where I live. The Medford Cracker was an apparently delicious cracker. It was called a cracker because it had a seam that you could crack and break it into smaller pieces. His was one of the first, and maybe it was actually even the first, to be called a cracker.
15:04 Nicola Twilley? The idea of baking flour and water into a crispy wafer thing wasn't new, but using the word cracker to refer to it was. And Mariah's dad's version was apparently the first to have this seam for easy cracking. So maybe he really did invent the first cracker.
15:22 Cynthia Graber? Nobody seems to know for sure. But even though he was a super successful baker and businessman, he wasn't particularly interested in educating his children, especially his daughters, one of whom was Mariah.
15:32 Speaker 05 But her brother loved books so much that the family doctor finally said to them, "Your son is never going to be any good to you in the family bakery, so you might as well send him to Harvard." So they did. They sent him to Harvard. He then went on and became a professor of theology at Harvard. But what's relevant for our story is that he passed his books on to his little sister. And they formed what she later described as a secret society in his bedroom, where they would meet after he would come home from school and he would tell her about Shakespeare and Milton. And she developed a love of reading and very quickly, a love of writing.
16:12 Nicola Twilley? And by the age of 22, she burst onto the literary scene.
16:15 Speaker 05 She became rather famous, even infamous, for a novel that she wrote called Hobumuck. Which was a novel about a Native American warrior who marries a white European settler. So it was already controversial. And yeah, it made her famous.
16:32 Cynthia Graber? After that, she published a super successful and super popular magazine, a periodical. It was called The Juvenile miscellany.
16:39 Speaker 05 This was the kind of thing that children all up and down the eastern seaboard would like wait on the stoop of their houses for it to come. Like they'd watch for the mailman to come and deliver this. And it was full of poems and songs and games and stories and puzzles.
16:56 Cynthia Graber? In her spare time, she also wrote another couple of novels. And then, while she was still in her twenties, she wrote a book called The Frugal Housewife.
17:04 Speaker 05 Which was one of the United States' first self-help books. And it is a wonderful read even now. It's full of recipes for everything from roast goose to roast pig. It can tell you how to get rid of cockroaches, how to set a sprained ankle. And it was a book with a real political message as well. So she wanted Americans to be frugal because she was convinced that frugality was necessary for a democracy. So it was like part cookbook, part self-help book, part political treatise. It was immensely popular. It sold out, I think, four times in
17:48 Speaker 05 the first year that it was published. It stayed in print for decades. Julia Child talks about it in one of her cookbooks and quotes a recipe from it as like a wonderful example of early American cooking.
18:01 Cynthia Graber? When it was published, Mariah hadn't yet turned 30. She was a woman and women pretty much couldn't do anything independent in the 1820s. They couldn't own property. They belonged to their husbands and so on. And she had become literally a household name.
18:15 Speaker 05 So she was also a very new thing in a very new country. She was one of the United States' first self-sufficient female authors.
18:23 Cynthia Graber? She was also a little bit avant-garde politically, too. When it came to Native Americans, her first novel had a very different point of view from the mainstream.
18:32 Speaker 05 This was a time at which there was a lot of literature portraying Native Americans as bestial and savage and
18:41 Speaker 05 Her book, in contrast to that, is a very sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans.
18:47 Cynthia Graber? When it came to slavery, Massachusetts had already abolished slavery, and Mariah definitely seems to have been against it. But even in the North, there were a lot of arguments floating around, ones that she heard and sympathized with, that maybe slavery couldn't or shouldn't be banned altogether.
19:01 Speaker 05 That it wasn't so bad, and maybe it was even good for enslaved Africans because they could be exposed to Christianity or quote unquote civilized. Or maybe slavery was just going away anyway, and it was sort of unfortunate, but it was all going to end before long. Or maybe there just wasn't anything that your average white northerner could do about it. So it was kind of embarrassing and unfortunate, but nothing anyone around you was doing anything about. And humans being what we are, if no one around us is doing something about something, we generally don't think we need to either.
19:40 Cynthia Graber? But Mariah's attitude towards slavery did shift. She became a fervent abolitionist, thanks to a couple of people. First, she got married to a very charming and charismatic man, who kind of unusually wasn't threatened by her talent and success. And he was passionately committed to ending slavery. Those were his good qualities, though he wasn't exactly perfect.
20:03 Speaker 05 Child's husband, David Lee Child, was a kind of walking financial disaster. He was a lawyer, he was a politician, he was an editor. He failed at everything he tried.
20:17 Cynthia Graber? Luckily, though, his wife was incredibly successful, so she could bankroll their future endeavors, one of which was becoming sugar beet farmers as a way to help end slavery. That story after the break.
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22:38 Nicola Twilley? In 1830, a year after they got married, Mariah and David met and became huge fans of a writer named William Lloyd Garrison. At the time, Garrison was already a very vocal, maybe the most vocal abolitionist.
22:53 Speaker 05 And I think we need to be very clear that that word in the 1830s meant to be an absolute radical, like the kind of person most people didn't want to have dinner with. It meant that you accepted that slavery should end immediately, not gradually.
23:10 Speaker 05 And that there should be no compensation to enslavers.
23:14 Nicola Twilley? Garrison had spent time listening to the stories and experiences of black people in America, educating himself about the moral and physical atrocities of slavery.
23:24 Speaker 05 And then at a certain point, he realized that if he was going to turn his abolitionist convictions into action, he was going to need white allies. More specifically, he was going to need white authors. And he knew about child. He knew how good she had been at writing fiction, but also writing these aspirational self-help books that helped Americans think about how to cook and how to clean and how to be good Americans. And he had also read what she'd written about Native Americans. So he could see that she had a bent for racial justice. And so he requested that they meet. And we don't have
24:07 Speaker 05 any recording or report from that meeting, but she describes that meeting as a conversion experience, that he gave her arguments that meant that the scales fell from her eyes. She realized she could never live her life the same way again. She said, I says, I could not do otherwise, so help me God.
24:28 Nicola Twilley? And so Mariah devoted three years to researching slavery and then published a book called An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.
24:37 Speaker 05 And this book was a kind of fire hose of argumentation against slavery. It was the first book-length publication against slavery in the United States. It had chapters on politics, on economics, on morals, on history. And these were things that that women really were not supposed to be meddling in.
25:00 Nicola Twilley? So that already alienated a lot of her friends in Boston. And then, even though northerners saw themselves as on the good side of this issue, Mariah didn't let them off the hook either.
25:10 Speaker 05 Her last chapter was essentially about northern racism and the ways northern racism enabled southern slavery. And the first sentence is something like, "While we cast our earnest disapprobation upon our brethren in the South, let us not flatter ourselves that we are any better than they."
25:36 Speaker 05 And needless to say, this is not what anyone in Boston wanted to hear.
25:39 Nicola Twilley? This pretty much wrecked both her social life and her career.
25:42 Speaker 05 She lost her income. Her other books were taken off the shelves. She had to give up the juvenile miscellany because parents canceled their subscriptions in droves, fearing that while they were not looking, she was turning their children into abolitionists. This turns out to have been true in some cases. So there's one wonderful letter that she got later in her life from someone who says, "I was one of the schoolgirl abolitionists who was inspired by your writings and went on to live my whole life trying to live up to those principles." So the parents who canceled their subscriptions weren't wrong.
26:26 Speaker 05 This meant that the Childs were really plunged into financial crisis.
26:32 Nicola Twilley? And even though she'd inspired some people, it wasn't enough. Writing about the horrors of slavery didn't seem to do the trick on its own. So then, Mariah and David, because they believed this was their essential task, they looked around for another way to end slavery.
26:48 Speaker 05 And there had been a kind of "don't buy products" from enslaved labor movement already. So people had talked about not wearing cotton, for instance. But the other major economic agricultural driver of the success of slavery was sugar.
27:09 Nicola Twilley? Finally, beets come back into the picture. This was right at the time, as you might remember, that France and Germany had started revving up their beet sugar production.
27:17 Speaker 05 And so Child's husband, David Lee Child, came up with this idea that he would go to Europe and learn to turn sugar beets into sugar.
27:30 Speaker 05 So he managed to talk a company into sponsoring his trip to France. He went over there to try to learn all of the machinery, all of the processes of turning sugar beets into sugar.
27:44 Nicola Twilley? David learned everything he could, came back to the US, and he and Mariah used her savings to move to the countryside, to Northampton, which is about 100 miles west of Boston. The plan was to start a beet sugar farm and single-handedly take down big, slave-grown cane sugar.
28:00 Speaker 05 It's hard to believe that anyone believed that this would work, but there were other people who supported the idea, and David Lee Child was never one to let a harebrained idealistic scheme go unattempted.
28:16 Nicola Twilley? Unsurprisingly, it wasn't exactly easy to launch America's very first sugar beet farm.
28:21 Speaker 05 David Lee Child had never really farmed before. The farming of sugar beets entailed all of the normal challenges of farming, but also he didn't have a local knowledge base to fall back on. He didn't have people to help him repair parts when things fell apart. Growing the beets, of course, was its own challenge before you even tried to turn it into sugar. Child helped him. They were out in the fields together, you know, up to their knees in mud in the Massachusetts spring. And it was, in some ways, a success, which is to say that David Lee Child did manage to turn sugar beets into sugar.
29:05 Speaker 05 And he even like won an award for it from an institute that was trying to award Americans being agricultural entrepreneurs. But he made no money, and he went more and more into debt.
29:20 Nicola Twilley? But Mariah and David were committed. This was bigger than them.
29:23 Speaker 05 And I think what moves me so much about this episode in their marriage is they both believed so strongly in the cause of abolitionism that they were willing to keep trying. So he would say to her, "I just need one more year. I just need one more year." And she would say, "But we don't have any money." And he would say, "But the slaves." And then she would feel like she couldn't keep saying, "No, we, you know, we can't afford that." Because what was their financial suffering compared to the millions of enslaved?
29:56 Speaker 05 People in the South.
29:58 Cynthia Graber? So to try to support the farm, Mariah fell back on what she knew, writing. She moved to New York and got a job. She became the very first woman to edit a major political weekly journal.
30:08 Nicola Twilley? Meanwhile, back on the farm, David Asper kept losing money. Eventually, they literally went bankrupt and lost everything.
30:16 Speaker 05 So at that point, not only had she poured her energies and all of her financial efforts into trying to keep this farm afloat, but the bankruptcy proceedings included the sale of her of her books.
30:31 Nicola Twilley? This was devastating. In fact, it sort of brought their marriage to an end, at least for a bit.
30:37 Speaker 05 David Lee Child went off and did all kinds of other harebrained things. She tried to make a go of being an author in New York, but they did reconcile. They got back together after about a decade and lived the rest of their lives, I will say, happily. So it's a good love story, anyway.
30:58 Cynthia Graber? And while sugar from beets did not end slavery, Mariah's writing did help inspire the anti-slavery movement that kept getting stronger and stronger until, of course, the Civil War.
31:07 Speaker 05 And then after the Civil War, she continued to fight for racial justice. She did not think that the war was going to solve problems of racial justice. She was right about that. She helped Harriet Jacobs publish her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which is one of the most important slave narratives ever published and the first one published by a woman.
31:29 Nicola Twilley? And eventually, the sugar beet industry succeeded in America, too. At the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s, a few things happened. One, the USDA spent a bunch of time and money figuring out where beets would actually grow well in the US. Two, the government at the time put very high tariffs in place that made domestically grown beet sugar much more cost competitive. And three, Mormons got really excited about sugar beets.
31:55 Cynthia Graber? In the late 1800s, the president of the Mormon Church said that he had received a message from the Lord and God told him to start farming sugar beets. So they did just that in Utah. But also, there were farms in California and Colorado. Today, Minnesota is the biggest sugar beet farming state in the country, and sugar beet farming in general is a massive industry.
32:13 Speaker 05 I come from Minnesota. When you are in Minnesota in harvest season, you'll see these immense semi trucks full of sugar beets. And they get dumped in these pyramid size, like Egyptian pyramid size, pyramids in fields all over the state.
32:36 Speaker 00 And of course, today, in America, we, 50% of our sugar is, is from the sugar beet.
32:41 Nicola Twilley? In other words, the sugar beet is the breakout star of the beet family. It is the most recent and most popular beet of all. We eat a lot of sugar beet. But the humble, round, red vegetable version of the beet? That has traditionally been much less beloved.
32:58 Speaker 00 I would say beets were, they were despised. They were something people made fun of. And I would say too, beets may be the only vegetable that have a board game associated with them. And the game is called Bad Beets. And the goal of the game, the objective is to give away all of your beets. So, I mean, think about that. You know, it's just like, how bad can it get?
33:22 Nicola Twilley? Erwin himself, a man who has devoted his career to beets? When he was a little kid, he wasn't into them. They just seemed like old people food.
33:29 Speaker 00 My family comes from Eastern Europe. And I associated beets with like, everybody in my family who was over 80. Or, you know, the huddled masses branch of my family, you know, the people who came over from Eastern Europe. It seemed like that's who ate beets.
33:42 Nicola Twilley? But even the humble borscht beet has had a little glow up recently. That story after the break.
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35:51 Cynthia Graber? When Irwin started studying and breeding beets a few decades ago, they were so unpopular that the most important thing about them was actually not about the best way to enjoy them at dinner. It was about mining beets for the source of all that super-rich pigment that stains your hands when you're chopping.
36:06 Nicola Twilley? Stains your hands and your excretions, as this episode of Portlandia demonstrates quite vividly.
36:13 Speaker 09 911, where's your emergency? There's blood everywhere. I need to know what you had for dinner this evening. A salad. Could there have been beets in the salad, sir?
36:23 Speaker 00 Yes, there is a very interesting phenomenon called beecheria, which is a condition that some 14% of people have, which means you cannot absorb those pigments at all. You excrete them entirely. And... There is quite a shock, I think, that people have when they eat a lot of beets, that they excrete the betalene pigments. But physicians will tell you, especially emergency room physicians will tell you, that they get calls from people saying, you know, "I'm bleeding. I need to come in." And a very common thing that they will ask is, "Have you recently eaten beets?"
37:00 Speaker 09 911, where's your emergency? Are you able to breathe? Yeah. Is it beets? Yeah. Great. Hi, was it beets? Yeah. That's up. 911, how were those beets you ate tonight? Hi, I assume it's beets? Beets, bud, what's your problem?
37:14 Cynthia Graber? But that terrifying color does have a practical use.
37:17 Speaker 00 Right, so back in 1972, the red dye number 2 was banned in the United States as a suspected carcinogen.
37:23 Speaker 10 Today's decision came as a policy switch for the FDA, which earlier this month said it would not ban the coloring. New tests changed the agency's mind.
37:32 Speaker 11 There was a significant increase in the numbers of tumors found in certain varieties of rats upon the feeding of massive doses of red 2.
37:42 Speaker 00 And it was around that time that a couple of scientists here at UW-Madison looked at the red color of beets and thought, "Well, maybe we could use the, essentially, the waste stream from the canning plants here." Because Wisconsin is the, first of all, we're the number-one beet state.
38:00 Nicola Twilley? Vegetable beets, of course. Minnesota is the sugar beet leader, as we said, but Wisconsin is all about red beets.
38:07 Speaker 00 And so, if you ever go into a beet canning factory at this time of year, you'll see just lots of red color.
38:13 Cynthia Graber? Scientists at Madison thought they could concentrate that pigment as a substitute for red dye number 2. It worked, they could make a dye, but they couldn't get enough pigment out of each beet to really make it worthwhile. So they decided to breed beets that have even more of the red stuff.
38:26 Nicola Twilley? When Erwin joined the team, he carried on the pigment breeding project. In the end, he said, "It took about 25 or 30 generations of beets to arrive at a beet that has so much pigment that it looks almost black inside." It has about five times more red pigment than a typical beet.
38:43 Speaker 00 It tastes terrible. You would never, ever want to eat it because we let everything else go. We didn't pay attention to anything but color so that we just selected for deep color. And they don't, they don't look nice, but they don't have to because really they're just a vessel for that color.
39:00 Nicola Twilley? Today, Erwin's black beets are grown specially as a source of food coloring for industry.
39:05 Speaker 00 It's a nice shade of red, but it's not as intense as the synthetic color that people probably are used to. You know, when we look at our box of Fruit Loops or whatever, if we compared that to the natural color Fruit Loops, maybe kids would be disappointed. But I think the beet red is still a nice color.
39:21 Nicola Twilley? Over the years, as Erwin was breeding a bad tasting but super colorful beet, he was surprised to see that the general public had started to fall in love with normal beet beets.
39:31 Speaker 00 You know, I'm pleased to tell you that there's been like a beet renaissance. I mean, I started to notice this in the mid 90s when Martha Stewart did like a thing on beets.
39:44 Speaker 12 Well, if you go to Balthazar, I highly recommend that you order the beet and the mosh salad. But in the meantime, we have Riyad right here in our studio to show us how to make it at home.
39:53 Speaker 00 People were roasting beets and then making the salad with goat cheese and walnuts. And that has taken off.
40:00 Nicola Twilley? The mid 90s were huge for beets. Back in the 1980s, Wolfgang Puck made a beet and goat cheese tower thing into a signature salad at his fancy restaurant Spago in LA. And then, like Erwin said, in the 90s, Martha Stewart championed beet and goat cheese salads. And before you knew it, the beet and goat cheese combo had taken over America. But there are some people, like me, who never hopped onto that beet salad train.
40:27 Speaker 00 When I go and talk to consumers, they often separate themselves into two groups. There are people who just, like yourself, Cynthia, who say, you know, it's not for me. That is just like, it's like eating dirt, whatever. I just don't like it. I don't want to have anything to do with them. And there are people who love the earthy flavors. And so you do find both of those types.
40:48 Nicola Twilley? I am an earthy flavor lover. I appreciate that about beets, and so does Erwin. But as a beet professional, he wanted to expand the circle and welcome people like Cynthia into a better relationship with beets.
41:01 Speaker 00 One of the big things we've done in our breeding work is to try to cater to those. People like yourself who aren't big fans to get rid of some of that earthiness, which is due to a molecule called jasmin, and see if we can make something that's a little more palatable.
41:15 Nicola Twilley? Jasmine, this is the main flavor note that turns off people like me.
41:18 Speaker 00 Jasmin is a simple molecule that is made by microbes for the most part. And I would say one of the groups of microbes that's most commonly making it is the streptomyces bacteria that live in the soil. And everybody knows the smell of soil. I mean, when you dig your garden, you know, you're, you get that, just that incredible smell of soil. So it's, it's basically everywhere because the microbes make it. It's in all soils, it's in rivers, it's in bodies of water. When it rains really hard and then you get that scent in the air after the rain, that's jasmine in the air.
41:54 Nicola Twilley? Which is a smell I love, but it's not there just to be delightful. In nature, jasmine is a signal. The bacteria in the soil are making it to attract bugs that will spread them around.
42:05 Cynthia Graber? Erwin and his colleagues thought that somehow beets were picking up jasmine from their microbes in the soil.
42:10 Nicola Twilley? And then his lab did an experiment on beets that showed something else was going on altogether.
42:15 Speaker 00 When you grow them, not in soil, in completely sterile conditions with no microbes, they produce an incredible amount of jasmine.
42:24 Nicola Twilley? Nobody knows exactly why beets make their own jasmine.
42:26 Speaker 00 Maybe they do not want to be loved. I don't know what it is, but they, they manufacture, they have the genes to make their own jasmine for reasons we don't understand.
42:36 Nicola Twilley? That jasmine is responsible for the earthy taste that Cynthia and many others don't like. But that's not the only thing standing between beets and universal adoration.
42:46 Speaker 00 A lot of people do. If they get into it enough to eat beets, they find that there is another problem with them, and that is oxalate. So oxalic acid is present in very high amounts in charred and beet. It's a defensive compound that plants make, which is actually in, in a plant is in a crystalline form. So it's in the form of an oxalate crystal. That when you eat the beet or the charred, it's abrasive in the inside of your mouth.
43:15 Cynthia Graber? Not everyone notices the sensation of like an almost itchy feeling, but here again, I'm one of the sensitive ones. I notice it with beet leaves and charred, and even with spinach. They make my mouth feel dry. It's not super pleasant.
43:26 Nicola Twilley? So Irwin set out to breed a beet that was low in jasmine and low in oxalate. And as is always the case in conventional breeding, this was not a quick hit project.
43:37 Speaker 00 It just took a long, long time for us to make that selection effective and to get the levels down to a level where our goal was to have a beet that you could eat raw. It would just be like eating a carrot. You just cut it, put it in your mouth for a snack. No cooking needed.
43:53 Nicola Twilley? 16 years after he started, Irwin finally came up with a super low jasmine and even lower oxalate beet. It's called a Badger Flame. He wanted us to taste it, but we needed to have something to compare it to. So he cut off a slice of a regular beet first.
44:09 Speaker 00 This is above and beyond right here. If you have to do this. So take a little piece of that and try that. See what you think.
44:18 Cynthia Graber? Yeah.
44:19 Speaker 00 Really, really.
44:20 Cynthia Graber? Whoa.
44:21 Speaker 00 Yeah. Really strong, right?
44:24 Cynthia Graber? I love it. Oh, I hate it.
44:26 Speaker 00 Really earthy, right?
44:27 Nicola Twilley? Really earthy. It's a little bitter aftertaste to have it raw. But I like it.
44:34 Cynthia Graber? Definitely not a fan.
44:35 Nicola Twilley? With that baseline beet taste established, it was time to try Irwin's new and improved jasmine-free Badger Flame beet.
44:43 Cynthia Graber? So Irwin, this is your test. Can you get me to eat this beet?
44:46 Speaker 00 Well, see what you think about that.
44:48 Cynthia Graber? Okay.
44:49 Nicola Twilley? It's very pretty.
44:50 Cynthia Graber? It is very pretty. It's this like gorgeous canary yellow.
44:57 Cynthia Graber? Wow. That's gone.
45:00 Speaker 00 Sweet, no earthy?
45:02 Cynthia Graber? No.
45:02 Speaker 00 So that's what that is. Do you want another piece?
45:04 Cynthia Graber? Sure.
45:05 Nicola Twilley? Look at you saying yes to your second chunk of beet.
45:08 Speaker 00 So that, so it's a different, it's a complete, like almost a different vegetable. This is low, very low geosmin. And when you remove all that, you just taste the sucrose.
45:17 Nicola Twilley? These badger flame beets, when you cut them open, you get alternating stripes of yellow and orangey red. So they are, as we said, very pretty. And they are also sweet and delicious.
45:28 Cynthia Graber? They do have some downsides for growers. Lower levels of oxalates mean that the plants aren't as well protected against insects and other pests. And so they need a little more human protection. But the thing that's probably a downside for true beet lovers, and I certainly noticed this when I ate them, they didn't really taste so much like beets anymore.
45:46 Speaker 00 And I do feel like we kind of, you know, de-beated the beet in that sense. And it's sort of a, I don't know. There's a heretical element to that. But also, I feel like maybe it becomes a gateway beet then that other people could find and enjoy beets. We'll see, maybe even Cynthia, we'll see.
46:09 Cynthia Graber? Honestly, it has kind of worked. I now do eat beets regularly, the normal ones, but only if I douse them in vinegar after roasting them. That kind of cuts the earthiness for me. And then I love to add them to green salads.
46:20 Nicola Twilley? If you want to try the badger flame beets, you can grow your own. The seeds are for sale at the company Row 7. And if you just want to buy the vegetable, they're for sale raw and in cans at Whole Foods and various specialty stores.
46:33 Cynthia Graber? Thanks so much to Erwin Goldman and to Lydia Molland. You can find links to Lydia's book and to Erwin's research and the seeds on our website, gastropod.com.
46:40 Nicola Twilley? And as always, huge thanks to our producer, Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a new episode for you. Till then.
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