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? It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. This is really...
It's not for a gastropop. What are we forcing Cynthia to taste?
“What dreadful horrifying repulsive thing could we possibly be making”
her eat for your delight in entertainment? It is dear listeners, a beat.
Yes, I am one of those people who recoils from beat salad, forced, basically anything dark
red and earthy. I am indeed Cynthia Cynthia Graber, and you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast looks at food through the lens of science and history. Whereas I am Nicola Twilly, lover of beats, which I grew up calling beatroot, 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 beat breeder is aiming to change that. 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 sugarbeat farmer. Yes, sugarbeats are beats too, which was as surprised to me.
The synone and all will be revealed.
This episode is supported and parted 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. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.
And I'm Cassidy Hover, the host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom, and this is M. Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds, dropping May 14th. Tap in, what is it? What does it take to be prepared for disaster?
“You have to be confident, you have to be calm, will you be perfect?”
No, but the idea is that you'll have your bearings and this won't be something new to you. This week, I'm explaining to me how to stay ready so you don't have to get ready. New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Think of a beat.
You're picturing something round, red, and sort of earthy tasting. And if you're Cynthia, you're also shattering. 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 beat.
As it turns out, most of the beats grown today are sugar beats. The sugar beat is such an economically important crop in this country and in this world that the investment in research and sugar beat just dwarfs that availability. I'm one of the very few people working on the table beat in this country. Irwin Goldman is the only public beat breeder in the United States.
It's a lonely gig. If you got all the people working on table beat research together in the world, we could probably meet in a small conference room. Irwin is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, like he said, he studies table beats. These are the kinds of beats you'd buy for your beats salad.
He previously starred in our carrot episode because he also researches and breeds carrots and carrots. Unlike beats, do not have a cousin called the sugar carrot because carrots don't make enough of a particular type of sugar called sucrose. If you make fructose and glucose and I would say, you know, sucrose is just simply fructoses
and glucose is stuck together at a ratio of like almost one to one. Glucose, fructose, sucrose. They're all different kinds of sugars that plants make, but very, very few plants make a lot of sucrose. 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 fructose 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.
Many vegetables do make the fructose and glucose, the simple sugars, but don't really make the sucrose. But beats do. And sugar beats are fully one-quarter sucrose.
So they're like sugar factories, it's incredible.
Sugar beats, table beats, there's a whole family of related vegetables and they all originally come from a plant called the wild sea beat. It's native to the Middle East and all the way up through Scandinavia, but it seems like our modern beats hail from the shores of the Mediterranean.
“And it is an ancient plant cultivated largely, I think, for its foliage and for the leaves.”
So the Greeks, the ancient Greeks and Romans, and even ancient Egyptian civilization, talked about the use of a vegetable beat, but almost exclusively as a leaf crop.
Or when says, it seems as though CB leaves were mostly eaten in salad form, w...
makes sense based on his experience.
“He got some CB seeds, he still grow wild in the Mediterranean, and he grew them himself.”
It is a very different plant than the cultivated beat, with a leaf that 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, almost crisp. In this ancient CB, the root is definitely not the star of the show, it's not large and
round and juicy. If you pull 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.
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
“Katalus used a boiled beet as an analogy for a limp penis, that doesn't necessarily make”
boiled beet sound super appetizing and, as we said, people prefer the leaves, but Irwin did find a couple of interesting ancient boiled beet root recipes. You know, it almost like a stew or a soup, so that I would say is probably the most prominent but there's a tomutic recipe. The tomat is the major Jewish rabbinic document that was written between the first and
six centuries 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. And there there's a recommendation to celebrate a festive day with Beats, the root, a large fish and garlic or there's a recipe where people have sliced the root of the beet,
but leeks, coriander, cumin, wine, and then boil the whole thing down. The much more popular leaves of this ancient CE beet went on to have a glorious career as what we now know as "chard." People kept on selecting for bigger and bigger leaves and we can buy those in bunches at the supermarket today.
And over the centuries, people also took the CE beet down a separate plant pathway, they selected for larger and fleshier roots over and over again. Beats root is particularly and kind of unusually well-suited to this type of selection. It has like tree rings. It's a plant that has multiple layers of xylam and xylam and xylam and xylam and xylam and
xylam and xylam. xylam and xylam 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 beats have it organized in concentric circles that all grow and rings at the same time.
Rather than year after year, like a tree. 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 xylam and xylam and xylam just like you would see in a tree rings. You can see those lighter and darker rings and sliced beats today.
No one doesn't know how long it took people to continually select for fleshier and fleshier beet roots until they had nice big ones.
The first evidence that we can find is in the 1500s to find actual paintings or drawings
where there's a true swollen root. These swollen round red beats 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. In the same century, beats with swollen roots also appeared in urbles, which are books about
useful plants. So it seems like the roots were finally pretty popular, and at this point the beet took its starring role in what is possibly the most iconic beet dish of all. First, originally the borched was not made with beats 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 beats 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 borched, which has beats in it.
A third line of this beet family was something called the Manglevirtzel.
It was a cross between charred and tablebeats. It was developed originally as animal food, and it's super hardy. It's not as beautiful as the vegetable. It's a little more fibrous than the vegetable, but is a large biomass and a certainly sweet,
“and people call 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.
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. A French scientist in the late 1500s had figured out that beats have sucrose. As we said, this is the same form of sugar as isn't sugarcane, and as you'll know if you listen to our sugar episode, sugar from sugarcane was super popular, but still quite expensive in Europe, because it had to be grown in a warmer climate and imported.
The first sugar made from beats was pink, which sounds super pretty, but it wasn't as
efficient to make as cane sugar because ordinary beats, whether they be tablebeats or these livestock fodder, manglevirtsels, they don't have a ton of sugar in them. They're only five or six percent sucrose. So the budding investigation into beat 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 beats again.
“And this time it kicked off a race to develop a new commercial source of sugar.”
So of course, Europe was getting a sugar from the colonies. And the fact that a domestic plant like beet could make sucrose was extremely interesting to the Europeans. 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 sugarcane plantations.
And so that put a squeeze on Europe's supply of the sweet stuff. And then to make matters worse, in 1811 as part of the war against Napoleon, the brits cut off his supply of raw sugarcane from French colonies in the West Indies and French people were feeling a little desperate. 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 sugar from the colonies. And even though beet didn't win the prize, somebody got it for some other reason. It gives you an indication for how keen they were to have a domestic source of sugar. So European scientists began to focus a lot of energy on breeding sweeter, mangle fertilizer.
“And so I would say that like breeding for high-secret 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 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%.
Like Irwin 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 sugarbeats up from zero, only a few decades earlier.
The next big thing in the sugar beet story involves the most interesting woman you've never heard of. But this song that so many people might have heard in a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, it was actually written as a poem. And originally those kids were going to grandfather's house, not grandmothers, but it
was written by a truly awesome woman named Lydia Mariah Child. She went by Mariah. Lydia Mariah Child was one of her generations' fiercest abolitionists and social reformers generally. This is another Lydia, who actually goes by Lydia, Lydia Molen, 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.
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. Mariah's first connection to food was not beet-based. 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. 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.
The idea of baking flour and water into a crispy way for 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. Nobody seems to know for sure, but even though he was a super successful baker and
business man, he wasn't particularly interested in educating his children, especially
His daughters, one of whom was Mariah.
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 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. And by the age of 22, she burst onto the literary scene. She became rather famous even infamous for a novel that she wrote called Hobamuk, 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. After that, she published a super successful and super popular magazine, a periodical. It was called the juvenile miscellaneous. This was the kind of thing that children all up and down the eastern seaboard would like to 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 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, 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 the first year, that it was published at state and”
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. 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 that
couldn't do in property, they belonged to their husbands and so on, and she had become literally a household name. So she was also a very new thing, and a very new country.
She was one of the United States' first self-sufficient female authors.
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. This was a time at which there was a lot of literature portraying Native Americans as
“Bistool and Savage, and her book in contrast to that is a very sympathetic portrayal of Native”
Americans. 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.
But 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 nor their nerd could do about
it. It's 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. 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.
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. Luckily though, his wife was incredibly successful, so she could bankroll their future endeavors. One of which was becoming sugarbeat farmers as a way to help end slavery. That story after the break.
Hi, I'm Maria Sharipova, host of the Pretty Tough Podcast.
Each episode, I sit down with high-achieving women to discuss the pursuit of ...
apology.
This week, journalist Deena USC and now, along with her husband, Bob Eiger, owner of the
Angel City FC Women's Soccer team. Willow Bay. I said, Bob, are you interested in doing this? And he said, absolutely.
“But I was definitely the driving force I think in the conviction about Angel City.”
Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. Complex and unprecedented the Spanish authorities are calling it. Under the December goal, I've seen Tomatika's. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus, stricken Dutch cruise ship,
disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early early this morning.
And we assess that individual they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today explain drops every week afternoon. Hey I'm Matthew Show, comedian, writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP and I'm starting a brand new podcast.
Wait, don't swipe away. It's called that sounds like a lot. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world and then
“I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly anyone who responds to my DMs.”
This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. That sounds like a lot part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. 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. 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, and that there should be no compensation to enslavers.
“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. 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. So he requested that they meet, and we don't have 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." 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. 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 women really were not supposed to be meddling in. So that already alienated a lot of her friends in Boston. And then even though Northernard sold themselves as on the good side of this issue, I didn't let them off the hook either.
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 disappropation upon
our brethren in the south, let us not flatter ourselves that we are any better than they."
Needless to say, this is not what anyone in Boston wanted to hear.
This pretty much wrecked both her social life, enter a career.
“She lost her income, her other books were taken off the shelves.”
She had to give up the juvenile miscellaneous because parents cancelled 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 school girl 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 cancelled their subscriptions weren't wrong. This meant that the child's were really plunged into financial crisis. 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 believe this was their essential task, they looked”
around for another way to end slavery. Their 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.
Finally, beats come back into the picture.
This was right at the time, as you might remember, that France and Germany had started revving up their beat sugar production. And so child's husband, David Lee, child, came up with this idea that he would go to Europe and learn to turn sugar beats into sugar. So he managed to talk a company into sponsoring his trip to France.
You went over there to try to learn all of the machinery, all of the processes of turning sugar beats into sugar. David learned everything he could, came back to the US. He and Mariah used her savings to move to the countryside to Northampton, which is about a hundred miles west of Boston.
The plan was to start a beat sugar farm and single-handedly take down big, slave-grown cane sugar. 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 hair brand idealistic
scheme go un-adempted, unsurprisingly, it wasn't exactly easy to launch America's very first sugar beat farm. David Lee, child, had never really farmed before the farming of sugar beats 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, whim things, fell apart, growing the beats, 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, up to their knees and 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 beats into sugar, and he even 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. But Mariah and David were committed, this was bigger than them.
“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 can't afford that." Because what was their financial suffering compared to the millions of enslaved people
in the south? 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.
Meanwhile, back on the farm, David, as per kept losing money. Eventually, they literally went bankrupt and lost everything. 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 books. This was devastating. In fact, it sort of brought their marriage to an end.
At least for a bit.
David Lee child went off and did all kinds of other hair-brained 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. And while sugar from Beats 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. 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 in the first one published by a woman.”
And eventually, the sugar beat 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 Beats would actually grow well in the U.S. Two, the government at the time put very high tariffs in place that made domestically grown
Beats sugar much more cost competitive, and three Mormons got really excited about sugar beats. And 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 beats, so they did just that in Utah. But also there were farms in California and Colorado today, Minnesota is the biggest
sugar beat farming state in the country, and sugar beat farming in general is a massive industry. And from Minnesota, when you are in Minnesota in harvest season, you'll see these immense semi-tracks full of sugar beats, and they get dumped in these pyramid size, like Egyptian pyramid size, pyramids in fields all over the state.
And of course today, in America, we 50% of our sugar is from the sugar beat. In other words, the sugar beat is the breakout star of the beat family. It is the most recent and most popular beat of all. We eat a lot of sugar beat, but the humble round red vegetable version of the beat, that has traditionally been much less beloved.
I would say Beats were despised, they were something people made fun of, and I would say to Beats may be the only vegetable that have a board game associated with them, and the game is called Bad Beats, and the goal of the game, the objective is to give away all of your beats.
“So I mean, think about that, you know, it's just like how bad can it get?”
Or when himself, a man who has devoted his career to Beats, when he was a little kid, he wasn't into them, it just seemed like old people food. My family comes from Eastern Europe, and I associated Beats 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 A. Beats.
But even the humble borscht beat has had a little glow up recently, that story after the break. Okay, so today, we're driving to Southern New Jersey, and heading to a day to sit there. A couple weeks ago, I read a story in J.T.com, and it was all about how there's a day to sit there going up in Conberland, County, the poorest county in New Jersey.
That's receiving some community pushback, and this is immediately got my attention, because data centers are going up all across the country. I feel like we should be hearing politicians talk more about this, but we haven't really heard a consensus. Our data centers really are necessary evil.
Let's find out.
This is technology we've never seen before.
Right.
“We're in experiment, we're in experiment down here, and we're the guinea pigs, right?”
Exactly. One thing that happens in this country is there's no planning for the future. Is it benefiting people or is it benefiting the elite and the money that's going into their pockets? This is not about abstract politics, it's about people's everyday lives.
That's this week on America, actually. Why is this, that's still like burning inside of me that I feel like I am missing something. I prayed so hard for my girl, I prayed every night, prayed, prayed, prayed, and when I lost my babies, it was so hard, so that when I had them, I thought that was going to be the thing.
I am finally getting the thing that I prayed for, and it's going to fill me, and this is
everything I want, and it was, but it was also something missing. I run out of sun, and this is Motherhood, the Remix, from Project Swagger. This series is about defining our own versions of Motherhood, I'm bringing in a mama eye, a door, and a admire. My friend, fellow Peloton instructor, Kirsten Ferguson, listen now at Project Swagger.
This week on Network and Chill, I'm telling you my entrepreneurial origin story.
Now I went from working a nine to five and making internet videos on the side, to walking away from a $625,000 year job to take your HBFF full time. I'm breaking down exactly how I knew it was time to make the leap, how I set myself up financially so I wasn't just winging it, and what it actually takes to survive and thrive as your own boss.
From cash flow to taxes to building multiple income streams, because let's be real, becoming
an entrepreneur sounds amazing until you realize you have to figure out all of this yourself.
I did, and now I'm giving you the blueprint. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com/yourrichbff. When Irwin started studying and breeding beats 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 beats for the source of all that super rich pigment that stains your hands when you're chopping. It stains your hands and your excretions as this episode of Portlandia demonstrates quite vividly. I'm one one, where's your emergency?
There's blood everywhere. I need to know what you had for dinner in this evening. A salad. Could there have been beats in the salads, sir? Yes, there is a very interesting phenomenon called Bicharia, 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 beats that they excrete the fatal impigments, but physicians will tell you, especially emergency room physicians will tell you that they get calls from people saying, "I'm bleeding.
I need to come in," and a very common thing that they will ask is, "Have you recently eaten beats?"
“The one was your emergency, are you able to breathe?”
Yes. Is it beats? Great. Hi, was it beats? Yeah, that's up.
Then one one, however, those beats you ate tonight. Hi, I assume it's beats? Beats but what's your problem? But that terrifying color does have a practical use. Right, so back in 1972, red dye number two was banned in the United States as a suspected
carcinogen. Today's decision came as a policy to which for the FDA, which earlier this month, said would not have been the coloring. New tests changed the agency's mind. There was a significant increase in the numbers of tumors found in certain varieties
of rats upon the feeding of massive doses of red, too. And it was around that time that the couple of scientists here at UW-Madison looked at the red color of beats 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 beats state." Vegetable beats, of course. Minnesota is the sugar beat leader, as we said, but Wisconsin is all about red beats. And so if you ever go into a beat canning factory at this time of year, you'll see just lots of red color.
Scientists at Madison thought they could concentrate that pigment as a substitute for red dye number two. It worked. They couldn't make a dye, but they couldn't get enough pigment out of each beat to really make it worthwhile.
So they decided to breed beats that have even more of the red stuff. When Irwin joined the team, he carried on the pigment breeding project. In the end, he said it took about 25 or 30 generations of beats to arrive at a beat that has so much pigment that it looks almost black inside. It has about five times more red pigment than a typical beat.
It tastes terrible.
You would never ever want to eat it because we let everything else go.
It didn't pay attention to anything but color so that we just selected for deep color. And they don't look nice, but they don't have to, because really they're just a vessel for that color. Today Irwin's black beats are grown especially as a source of food coloring for industry. 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 compare that to the natural color fruit loops, maybe kids would be disappointed.
“And I think the beat red is still a nice color.”
Over the years, as Irwin was breeding a bad tasting but super colorful beat, he was surprised to see that the general public had started to fall in love with normal beat beats. You know, I'm pleased to tell you that there's been like a beat Renaissance. I mean, I certainly noticed this in the mid 90s when Martha Stewart did like a thing on beats.
When you go to Balthazar, I highly recommend that you order the beat and the mosh salad. But in the meantime, we have real ad right here in our studio to show us how to make it at home. People were roasting beats and then making the salad with goat cheese and walnuts and that has taken off.
The mid 90s were huge for beats. Back in the 1980s, Wolfgang Puck made a beat and goat cheese tower thing into a signature salad at his fancy restaurant Spago in LA and then like Irwin said, in the 90s and Martha
Stewart champion beaten goat cheese salads and before you knew it, the beat a...
combo had taken over America.
“But there are some people like me who never hopped onto that beat salad train.”
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 it's 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 I, you do find both of those types. I am an earthy flavor lover. I appreciate that about beats. And so does Irwin, but as a beat professional, he wanted to expand the circle and welcome
people like Cynthia into a better relationship with beats. 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 Giazman and see if we can make something that's a little more palatable. Giazman, this is the main flavor note that turns off people like me.
Giazman 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 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 Giazman in the air. Which is a smell I love, but it's not there just to be delightful.
In nature, Giazman is a signal. The bacteria in the soil are making it to attract bugs that will spread them around. Darwin and his colleagues thought that somehow beats were picking up Giazman from their microbes in the soil. And then his lab did an experiment on beats that showed something else was going on all
together. When you grow them, not in soil in completely sterile conditions with no microbes, they produce an incredible amount of Giazman. Nobody knows exactly why beats make their own Giazman. 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 Giazman for reasons we don't understand. That Giazman is responsible for the earthy taste that Cynthia and many others don't like.
“But that's not the only thing standing between beats and universal adoration.”
A lot of people do, if they get into it enough to eat beats, 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 beat. It's a defensive compound that plants make, which is actually in a plant is in a crystal in form.
So it's in the form of an oxalate crystal. That when you eat the beat or the charred, it's abrasive in the inside of your mouth. Not everyone notices the sensation of like an almost itchy feeling, but here again I've one of the sensitive ones. I notice it with beat leaves and charred and even with spinach, they make my mouth feel
dry. It's not super pleasant. There are winds that out to breed a beat 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.
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 beat 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. 16 years after he started, or when finally came up with a super low jasmine and even lower
oxalate beat, it's called a badger flame. He wanted us to taste it, but we needed to have something to compare it to. So we cut up the slice of a regular beat first. This is above and beyond right here. You have to do this.
So take a little piece of that and try that and see what you think. Yeah. Really, really, whoa, yeah, really strong, right? I love it. I'll hate it.
Really earthy, right? Really earthy. It's a little better after taste to have it raw, but I like it. Definitely not a fan. With that baseline beat taste established, it was time to try our winds new and improved
jasmine-free, badger flame beat.
“So where when this is your test, can you get me to eat this beat?”
Well, see what you think about that. It's very pretty. It is very pretty. It's like gorgeous canary yellow. Wow.
That's gone. Sweet, no earthy? No. That's what that is. Do you want another piece?
Sure.
Look at you saying yes to your second chunk of beat.
So yeah, it's a different, it's a completely like almost a different vegetable. This is low, very low jasmine, and when you remove all that, you just taste the sucrose.
These badger flame beats, when you cut them open, you get alternating stripes...
and orangey reds, so they are, as we said, very pretty, and they are also sweet and delicious.
“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.
The thing that's probably a downside for true beat lovers, and I certainly noticed this
“when I ate them, they didn't really taste so much like beats anymore.”
And I do feel like we kind of, you know, debuted the beat in that sense, and it's sort of, I don't know, there's a heretical element to that, but also I feel like maybe it becomes a gateway beat, then that other people could find and enjoy beats. We'll see. Honestly, it has kind of worked, and now do eat beats regularly, the normal ones, but
only if I doubt them in vinegar after resting them. That kind of cuts the earthiness for me, and then I love to add them to green salads.
“If you want to try the badger flame beats, you can grow your own, the seeds are for sale”
at the company Rose 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. Thanks so much to Irwin Goldman and to Lydia Mulland, you can find links to Lydia's book, enter Irwin's research, and the seeds on our website, gastropod.com.
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.
