40 Fun Facts About Beets

Geosmin, the compound behind the earthy taste of beets, also creates which familiar outdoor smell?

Rain on dry ground stirs up geosmin too, part of the scent known as petrichor. Human noses are so sensitive to it that a few parts per trillion are enough to notice.

Which character in the American sitcom The Office runs a 60-acre beet farm with his cousin Mose?

Dwight Schrute sells his beets to local shops, restaurants and beet stands. The family farmhouse has nine bedrooms and a single bathroom, tucked under the porch.

For roughly one person in ten, eating beets harmlessly turns which bodily fluid pink or red?

Urine turns pink because betanin, the red beet pigment, can pass through the body without being broken down. Doctors call it beeturia, and it is more common in people short of iron.

In which country is a slice of pickled beet a traditional hamburger topping, alongside pineapple and fried egg?

Australia's takeaway burgers usually come with sliced beet, and one with every extra is known as a burger with the lot. New Zealand burgers carry beet as well.

Which French ruler toured a pioneering beet sugar refinery when wartime blockades had cut off cane sugar?

Napoleon I visited Benjamin Delessert's refinery, and Delessert received the Légion d'honneur for his beet sugar. By 1880 beets supplied more than half of the world's sugar.

Which vegetable with colourful stalks is the very same species as the beet, bred for its tops instead?

Swiss chard is Beta vulgaris, exactly like the beet, which is why it also goes by silver beet and leaf beet.

UNESCO added the cooking of borscht, the famous beet soup, to its endangered heritage list in 2022 for which country?

Ukraine gained the listing shortly after the 2022 invasion put the tradition at risk. UNESCO added that the inscription gives no single country ownership of the soup.

Ancient Romans valued beets as an important health food and also believed the vegetable worked as what?

An aphrodisiac was one Roman use for beets; another was medicinal. The cookbook of Apicius lists beet soups to be taken as a laxative.

In which 1990s cartoon about a daydreaming boy is the hero's favourite rock band The Beets, a spoof of the Beatles?

Doug Funnie idolises The Beets, whose members were drawn to resemble Ringo Starr and Robert Plant. Their endless reunion tours poke fun at the Who.

A beet-topped layered salad eaten at New Year in the former Soviet Union is nicknamed which fish 'under a fur coat'?

Herring sits at the bottom, buried under potato, carrot, egg and mayonnaise. The final layer of grated beet is the purple 'fur coat', which is why Russians call the dish shuba.

Unlike the red garden beet, the variety grown to make table sugar has a cone-shaped root of which colour?

White roots were what breeders in Silesia selected in the late 1700s, when the best beets held about 5% sugar. Modern sugar beets hold around 18%.

The world's first beet sugar factory opened in 1801 in Silesia, then part of which European kingdom?

Prussia's king backed the chemist Franz Achard, who opened the works at Kunern, a village now in Poland. In 1802 it processed 400 tons of beets.

Sugar beet growers and factories use which military-sounding name for the months-long harvest and processing season?

The campaign earns its name from the planning involved: factories run 24 hours a day and need beets delivered at a steady rate. In the UK it lasts about five months.

Czech tuzemák, a spirit distilled from sugar beets or potatoes, lost the right under EU rules to be called what?

Rum, under EU rules, has to be made from sugarcane, so the Czech favourite was renamed tuzemák. It began as a stand-in for the real thing in an empire with no tropical colonies.

A by-product of sugar beet refining is spread on what in winter?

Icy roads get the beet treatment because it eases the environmental harm done by salt and keeps working for longer once it is spread.

Once the sugar has been extracted, the leftover pulp of sugar beets is mostly sold as what?

Animal feed is where the pulp ends up: factories process it on site into fodder for cattle. Together with molasses, it adds about 10% to the value of the crop.

Which nutrient, now sold as a supplement, was first discovered in sugar beets?

Betaine echoes Beta, the Latin name of the beet. Chemists later found a whole family of similar compounds, so the original also goes by trimethylglycine.

Beets belong to the amaranth family, which makes them botanical cousins of which Andean crop?

Quinoa shares the family Amaranthaceae with beets and spinach. The kinship shows in the kitchen: beet tops cook down and taste much like spinach.

The wild ancestor of every cultivated beet is a tough perennial that still grows in which habitat?

Seashores from Britain to the Mediterranean are home to the sea beet, a plant with shiny greens that can be eaten like spinach. Every garden and sugar beet descends from it.

Which botanist gave the beet its scientific name, Beta vulgaris, in 1753?

Carl Linnaeus named it in his book Species Plantarum and counted the wild beet and the red beet as varieties of one species. Sugar beets were missing from his list because nobody had bred them yet.

The Borscht Belt, a string of Jewish summer resorts named after the beet soup, lay in which mountains?

The Catskills welcomed New York's Jewish holidaymakers at a time when some resorts openly refused them. Variety editor Abel Green coined the nickname, a play on the Bible Belt.

Borscht takes its Slavic name from which wild meadow plant, the soup's main ingredient long before beets?

Hogweed stems and flower heads were fermented to make the original tart soup, and the plant's Slavic name stayed with the dish after beets replaced it.

Polish Christmas Eve beet soup is served over uszka, mushroom dumplings whose name translates as what?

Little ears is the literal meaning of uszka, a nod to their folded shape. The mushrooms simmered for the soup's broth are saved to fill them.

Šaltibarščiai, a cold summer soup of beets and kefir, is one of the best-known dishes of which country?

Lithuania even launched a festival for the soup in Vilnius in 2023. It is served chilled, often with a halved boiled egg and boiled potatoes on the side.

The word borscht, for the classic beet soup, entered American English from Eastern Europe through which language?

Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews were the first to popularise the soup in North America, which is why the English spelling ends in a t that the Slavic word lacks.

Biff à la Lindström, a fried patty of minced meat mixed with chopped beets and capers, is a classic of which country?

Sweden claims the dish, though its beets and capers hint at Russian roots. One story has Henrik Lindström, raised in Saint Petersburg, teaching it to a Kalmar hotel kitchen in 1862.

Pickled beet eggs, hard-boiled eggs cured pink in a spiced beet brine, were created by which American community?

Pennsylvania Dutch cooks added beets to the pickled eggs their Anabaptist forebears brought from Europe. The eggs became a fixture of picnics and pot-lucks.

Before freeze-dried packs arrived in the 1970s, Soviet cosmonauts ate their borscht, beets and all, from what?

Sealed tubes held the space borscht, whose ingredients were cooked separately and combined in a strict order. In 1961 a test craft carrying a mannequin even broadcast a recipe for the soup.

On Punkie Night in late October, Somerset children parade with mangelwurzels, giant fodder beets, hollowed into what?

Lanterns called punkies are said to recall a windy night when village wives hollowed out mangelwurzels to shield their candles while fetching husbands home from a fair.

Farmers in the ancient Middle East first domesticated the beet mainly to eat which part of the plant?

The leaves came first: Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all grew beets as greens. Only by the Roman era are the swollen roots thought to have been raised for the table as well.

Raw beets, at only 43 calories per 100 grams, are an especially rich source of which B vitamin?

Folate is the standout: 100 grams of raw beet supplies about 27% of the daily value. Manganese and potassium come next, and the root itself is 88% water.

Which compound, which beets soak up from the soil, is credited with the blood-pressure-lowering effect of beet juice?

Nitrate has a downside as well: in excess it can turn into nitrosamines in the stomach, so researchers have tested bacteria that strip some of it out of the juice.

During the 17th century, beet juice was often added to which drink to deepen its colour?

Wine was routinely tinted with beet juice in the mid-1600s. The same pigment, betanin, still colours desserts and sweets today under the additive code E162.

The candy-striped Chioggia beet takes its name from an island fishing town near which Italian city?

Venice lies just up the lagoon from Chioggia, home of this 1800s heirloom. Sliced open, the beet shows concentric rings like a bullseye.

Beets are among the hungriest of all crops for which trace element, whose shortage causes heart rot?

Boron shortage starves the growing tip first, which is why the rot begins at the heart. A 60-tonne beet harvest draws about 600 grams of the element from each hectare.

By 2011, about 95% of US sugar beet acres grew plants engineered to survive which weedkiller?

Glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, lets growers spray weeds without harming the engineered crop. Sugar from these beets is approved for people to eat in multiple countries.

Which Berlin chemist showed in 1747 that the sugar in beets is identical to the sugar from cane?

Andreas Marggraf measured under 2% sugar in his beets, too meagre to pay. It took his student, and half a century of breeding, to turn the find into an industry.

Betanin, the pigment that makes beets red, also gives which of these its vivid magenta flesh?

Dragon fruit, bougainvillea and many cacti share the beet's family of pigments, the betalains. No plant has ever been found making both betalains and anthocyanins, the usual red pigments.

Victory gardeners in World War II took strong beet growth as a sign that their soil was not too what?

Acidic soil stunts beets, so a healthy row doubled as a free soil test. The plants do best in neutral to slightly alkaline earth.

Labskaus, a north German mash of corned beef and potato served with pickled beets, became a staple of which workers?

Sailors made the dish common during the Age of Sail. The Hamburg version comes with a fried egg, a gherkin and sliced beets on the side.