Feel the Beet: The Most Fascinating Woman You've Never Heard Of

0:06Okay, 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? I hate to ask you to do this. It's okay. I suffer for gastropod. What are we forcing Cynthia to taste? What dreadful, horrifying, repulsive thing could we possibly be making her eat for your delight and entertainment? 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.

0:47Whereas 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. 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. Yes, sugar beets are beets too, which was a surprise to me. Listen on, and all will be revealed. This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P.

1:28Sloan 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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3:13and huge, like a foot long. This is the sugar beet. As it turns out, most of the beets grown today are sugar beets. 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. Erwin Goldman is the only public beet breeder in the United States. It's a lonely gig. If you got all the people working on table beet research together in the world, we could probably meet in a small conference room. Erwin is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin.

3:48Like 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. They 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.

4:26This 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. Many vegetables do make the fructose and glucose, the simple sugars, but don't really make the sucrose. But beets do. And sugar beets are fully one-quarter sucrose. So they're like sugar factories. It's incredible. Sugar beets, table beets, there's a whole family of related vegetables.

4:58And 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. 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. Erwin says it seems as though sea beet leaves were mostly eaten in salad form, which he says makes sense based on his experience.

5:38He got some sea beet seeds. They still grow wild in the Mediterranean. And he grew them himself. It is a very different plant than the cultivated beet 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 sea beat, the root is definitely not the star of the show. It's not large and round and juicy. If you pulled it up, it has just a sort of almost like a deflated balloon and deflated almost all the way.

6:20So 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 Catullus 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 preferred the leaves. but Erwin did find a couple of interesting ancient boiled beetroot recipes.

7:01In almost like a stew or a soup. So that I would say is probably the most prominent, but there's a Talmudic recipe. The Talmud is the major Jewish rabbinic document that was written between the 1st and 6th 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 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.

7:42The much more popular leaves of this ancient sea 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 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. 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. Xylem and phloem are the two different kinds of pipework in a plant.

8:20One moves water and minerals up from the ground, the other mostly moves sugars from the leaves. All plants have this pipework, 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. 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. You can see those lighter and darker rings in sliced beets today. Erwin doesn't know how long it took people to continually select for fleshier and fleshier beetroots until they had nice big ones.

8:57The 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 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. 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. And at this point, the beet took its starring role in what is possibly the most iconic beet dish of all, borscht.

9:32Originally, 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. A third line of this beet family was something called the Manglwurzel. It was a cross between chard and table beets.

10:12It was developed originally as animal food and it's super hearty. 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. 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.

10:46A 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 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 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 mangelwurzels, they don't have a ton of sugar in them. They're only 5 or 6 percent sucrose.

11:20So 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. 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. 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.

12:02And 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 sugar cane 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 the 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.

12:36So European scientists began to focus a lot of energy on breeding sweeter mangelwurzel. So I would say that breeding for high sucrose was one of the first sort of major scientific targets in modern plant breeding. It had a clear 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 sugar beets up from zero only a few decades earlier.

13:20The next big thing in the Sugar Beats story involves the most interesting woman you've never heard of.

13:36This 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. Lydia Mariah Child was one of her generation's fiercest abolitionists and social reformers generally. This is another Lydia who actually goes by Lydia, Lydia Molan 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.

14:13And 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.

14:54The 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 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 seem 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 businessman, he wasn't particularly interested in educating his children, especially his daughters, one of whom was Mariah.

15:36But 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 And she developed a love of reading and very quickly a love of writing.

16:15And by the age of 22, she burst onto the literary scene. She became rather famous, even infamous, for a novel that she wrote called Hobomuk, 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 Miscellany. 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.

16:53And 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 20s, 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.

17:40So 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. 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. 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. So she was also a very new thing in a very new country.

18:22She 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 bestial 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.

19:04That 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. But Mariah's attitude towards slavery did shift.

19:47She 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 sugar beet farmers as a way to help end slavery.

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22:02I'm Maria Sharapova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts.

22:32In 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.

23:18And 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 any recording or report from that meeting.

24:05But 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 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.

24:49And 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 Northerners saw themselves as on the good side of this issue, Mariah 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 disapprobation upon our brethren in the South, let us not flatter ourselves that we are any better than they. And needless to say, this is not what anyone in Boston wanted to hear.