Cooking with beets as a beet-skeptic

With my commitment to seasonal food, a Thanksgiving topic was the obvious choice for this week’s column. But last Saturday in Oxford’s Farmers Market, I was stunned to see gorgeous beets prominently displayed at the 7 Wonders Farm table. 

I’m not a big fan of beets, but I couldn’t resist buying some, photographing them artistically, figuring out what to do with them and forgoing a Thanksgiving theme this week.

As a child I was not a picky eater, but I never cared for beets, which were served to me either pickled or in soup. When I first crossed the Atlantic alone as a teenager, for my very first meal in London I ordered what the menu called chicken salad. When I was served, I was in shock. Instead of chopped chicken in mayonnaise, the plate contained a hunk of bony, hard-to-eat chicken and a mountain of pickled beets.

What was a teenager to do for his first overseas meal? Like many children and grandchildren of survivors of the Great Depression and World War, I was taught to eat everything on my plate, because “children were starving in Europe.”

While no longer starving, the London I first encountered in 1969 was not yet fully recovered from the War. I visited still-bombed out sites for my research, and my grandmother made me carry nylon stockings in my suitcase to deliver to her London friend, who then kindly rented me a room in her apartment.

Anyway, back to beets. I had no choice at that first meal but to choke down the mountain of them on my plate. In the ensuing decades, I have done my best to avoid beets.

Beets have just about the highest sugar content of any vegetable — that’s why most are pickled or processed into sweeteners. Nearly all cultivated beets these days are sugar beets, grown for processing into sweeteners. One-third of sugary processed foods are sweetened with sugar beets. In contrast, the local beets at the Farmers Market are somewhat less sugary table or red beets, but they constitute a very small percentage of those that are grown in the U.S. and elsewhere.

With my commitment to all foods local, having purchased local organic beets from 7 Wonders Farm, I was faced with actually consuming them. Because I like raw crunchy vegetables like carrots and cabbage, one way to handle high-quality fresh local organic beets that works for me is to consume them raw.

My recommendation is to peel the beets and cut them into matchsticks. Local beets can be mixed with local apples or turnips also cut into matchsticks. They can be used with a dip such as local hummus from Chickpea Chicks, or sprinkled with olive oil and vinegar.

However, peeling and cutting beets has a distinctive challenge. When peeled and cut, beets stain hands, clothes, countertops and cookware. I’m not sure what to do about the countertops, but I strongly urge wearing a red Miami shirt during preparation.

Beets are thought to cleanse the liver, fight cancer, treat depression and lower blood pressure. If they accomplish any of these, I guess they are worth eating, but I’ll still forgo the pickled version.

James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.