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5 min readFeel the Beet: The Most Fascinating Woman You've Never Heard Of
Most people know the Thanksgiving poem "Over the River and Through the Wood" — but almost nobody knows its author, Lydia Maria Child, who was also America's first sugar beet farmer, a radical abolitionist, and one of the country's first self-sufficient female authors. This episode of Gastropod traces the beet's long journey from a wild Mediterranean sea plant to a modern vegetable that half of us love and half of us recoil from, and along the way tells the story of a woman who tried to use beets to end slavery.
The Beet's Ancient Roots
The wild sea beet, native to the Mediterranean and Middle East, was cultivated for thousands of years almost exclusively for its leaves. University of Wisconsin scientist Irwin Goldman, who breeds table beets, grew sea beet seeds himself and describes the leaves as having "a bright taste, almost sometimes citrusy." The root, by contrast, was "like a deflated balloon" — fibrous and unappealing. When ancient people did use the root, they boiled it into submission. The Roman poet Catullus used a boiled beet as an analogy for a limp penis.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:06) **Introducing the Beet and Its Haters** - Cynthia Graber confesses her hatred of beets, setting up the episode's central tension between beet lovers and haters.
- 2 (03:05) **The Beet Family Tree: From Sea Beet to Sugar Factory** - Plant breeder Erwin Goldman explains that most beets grown today are sugar beets, not the table beets we eat, and traces the plant's ancient origins.
- 3 (07:54) **Domesticating the Beet: From Leaves to Swollen Roots** - Over centuries, people selected sea beets for larger leaves (creating chard) and for fleshier roots, leading to the modern table beet.
- 4 (10:10) **The Rise of the Sugar Beet: A Sweet Solution to a Colonial Problem** - A third beet lineage, the mangelwurzel (animal fodder), was bred for higher sucrose content, eventually becoming the sugar beet that revolutionized the sugar industry.
- 5 (13:41) **Lydia Maria Child: The Most Fascinating Woman You've Never Heard Of** - The episode introduces Lydia Maria Child, a wildly successful 19th-century author, abolitionist, and America's first sugar beet farmer.
- 6 (16:19) **A Literary Sensation Turned Political Radical** - Child burst onto the literary scene with a controversial novel about Native Americans, then wrote America's first self-help book, all before turning 30.
- 7 (19:41) **Conversion to Abolitionism: The Meeting That Changed Everything** - Child's meeting with radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison transformed her from a moderate into a fervent, uncompromising abolitionist.
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Show Notes
For those who like its earthy flavor, the humble beet can do a lot for a salad or a soup. But could it help end slavery? In the 1800s, one woman believed it could—and she wasn't just any old woman. This episode, meet Lydia Maria Child, who wrote the first children's periodical magazine, the first New England historical novel, and one of America's first successful self-help books—all before she turned thirty, in an era where women were still considered property. This episode, we've got the fascinating story of why she bet big on beets, as well as how, more than a century later, Wolfgang Puck and Martha Stewart paired this much maligned vegetable with goat cheese to spark today's beet renaissance. Meanwhile, for the haters among us: is it possible to de-beet the beet, and get rid of that earthy flavor altogether? Listen in now as we meet the astonishing Lydia Maria Child, in the curious tale of the beet.
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