So why start with a beet? I mean, aside from our similarities of character: distinct, hearty, intense but not without an uncanny sense of playfulness…
A fine writer once began an entire novel with a beet, finishing his opening chapter with the Ukrainian proverb, “A story that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” And the risk of meeting the devil, he asserted, “is a risk we have to take.”
I remember reading that first page of Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume and feeling the breath catch in my adolescent chest. That sense of adventure thrilled me. I steeled my heart for an encounter with the devil himself and I quietly yearned for a bowl of borscht.
And here I am nearly a decade later, a sustainable food advocate following so many beets into the throes of a food movement, or at least the promising start of one. Indeed, our current global food system embodies many of the world’s more devilish qualities: hunger, poverty, inequity, environmental degradation, and a pervading lack of consideration for how human beings relate with nature and one another. Awareness of this crisis has grown from the stuff of counterculture to a palpable contemporary trend encompassing the likes of farmers, writers, nutritionists, policymakers, labor activists, educators and yes, the First Lady herself.
What remains to be seen is how this swath of people, impassioned and accomplished though it may be, will transform itself into one Movement capable of remaking the way we eat and live together. That’s the adventure at hand and that’s what I’ll explore here. I’ll also share moments from my life when food inspires that same delight that reading Jitterbug Perfume once did, because it’s those experiences that inform my consciousness as a citizen and a human being. For me, it has always begun with a beet.
We’ll see where the adventure takes us.
Begin with a Beet 