Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:
The news this week was certainly difficult to digest. A Stanford University climate study was reported to have concluded that heat waves like the one we had in early July will by the 2030s happen during a majority of summers. Those summers, moreover, will be markedly hotter on average than they are now. Worse, reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions will not change this prediction. The modeling is based on atmospheric changes that have already taken place. Not that we shouldn’t reduce our greenhouse gas production, as doing so may avert even more dire consequences down the road. To that end, Australian scientists were reported in last week's New York Times to be working to transform cow rumination to more resemble that of kangaroos. It seems kangaroos produce relatively harmless vinegar-like acids from their initial digestions, rather than the methane that cows belch forth. (Yes, belch. Since methane is produced in the first stomach, it comes out the front of the beast. Which is why Peter advises standing in back of a cow—not too close—rather than in front.) Intriguing as this Australian effort is, one wonders whether a less draconian remedy, such as reducing beef consumption and moving to purely grass-fed beef, might not be more practicable. Cows fed on grass are known to produce much less methane than those fed on grain. Indeed, I don’t hear much belching among our well-mannered cattle. Peter insists that they go behind the barn to do it.
The most dramatic news, however, was that we are all, in an important sense, farmers. I do not refer to the upsurge of roof crop-raising in New York or to the plans to return wide swaths of Detroit to pasture, but rather to the revelation in this week’s Science section that each of us is the steward of a unique internal biosphere all our own, housing within our bodies a seething, teeming cauldron of thousands of living organisms. Not just the transient guests, like the ones who took up temporary residence in me when I foolishly ignored Peter’s warning against eating a raw lamb dish in Southeastern Turkey a few years back. No, these organisms arrive contemporaneously with our birth, reproduce, and go through generations inhabiting us. We are, in a sense, the farm in which these organisms are grown, the universe they inhabit. Scientists are just beginning to understand this “microbiome,” our internal ecosystem. Its existence alone makes this layperson wonder whether we, too, might be just internal parasites of some far larger organism. Is our universe in fact just the blank space in the knee joint of some immensely larger creature, a space that might suddenly be obliterated if the creature gets arthritis or steps off the curb the wrong way? More seriously, the thought of this little world of opportunistic creatures within us, devouring each other and often the viruses and other microbes that invade us, makes me consider the dynamic nature of what it is that we devour. Eating is fundamentally all about fueling our bodies, and a huge number of energy sources could satisfy that function. Yet we seem not to be indiscriminate about the energy sources we ingest. We have tastes that evolve individually and collectively—and mysteriously.
Consider the beet. I grew up on cold beet borscht as a summer staple and hot cooked beets as the ultimate winter comfort food. When I was at home sick, my mother’s all purpose feel-better meal was “mashed potatoes, peas and beets,” which she told me had been her favorite plate as a child at the Horn & Hardart automat. Beets seem to me an essential part of the vegetable arsenal. Yet two of my law office employees told me they had never eaten beets. Apparently beets are not a universally esteemed vegetable. There is a reason for this. It turns out, and I thank Muneeba Raza for her research on this, that the root of the beet (which is what most Americans refer to as the beet) did not really become part of the human diet until the 1800s, when French chefs began to discover the culinary possibilities in them. Beets had been domesticated in the Mediterranean region by at least the second millennium B.C. But they, and their horticultural cousins chard and spinach beets, were eaten as greens. (Ironically, these days a lot of our customers automatically discard the greens assuming they are inedible.) Beets migrated east to Mesopotamia by the 8th century B.C., where we find the first written mention of them. They were recorded in China by 850 A.D. and in Northern Europe, thanks to the Romans, by the Middle Ages. The Germans called them Roman beets.
What did all these beet-leaf eaters do with my beloved beet root? It was generally used medicinally, for different problems in different eras. The Romans believed the root effective in treating fevers, while Medieval Europeans used them to treat digestive and blood disorders. Beet juice was thought by the Romans to be an aphrodisiac (but what wasn’t?). We know now that beets contains betaine, which stimulates the function of liver cells and contributes to the prevention of coronary and cerebral artery diseases. Some Hungarian research suggests that betaine has an anti-tumor effect. Beet roots were also used as a dye. This should hardly be surprising, as when the beets are cut the unstable cells immediately shed a purple stain. That use continues today, with products such as tomato paste including a beet dye. Beets’ high carbohydrate content, great as a source of quick energy, also made them a natural as a source for sugar, as the Germans did with the sugar beet in the 19th century.
But it took the French to develop beet roots into an object of human gustatory delight. And over the last 200 years, they have come to be appreciated as a colorful accent to our predominantly green vegetable dietary palette. Indeed, while one could extol their likely health benefits—they contain phosphorus, sodium, magnesium, calcium, iron, and potassium, as well as fiber, vitamins A and C, niacin, folic acid and biotin—I think we may appreciate them as much for the color contrast they lend to a dinner plate as for their sweetish taste and firm texture. At Turkana, we are, as usual, raising three types of beets this year. The classic in most people’s minds is the Detroit Red, a deep deep red beet which was introduced to the market in 1892. Some call it the heartiest and most flavorful, and I would agree that it comes close, though to my mind the Golden beet is sweeter. Golden beets, cultivars which date to 1828, are orange on the outside but turn yellow when cooked, and they hold their color (no bleeding). They are my personal favorites. The third, Chioggia, introduced from Italy in the 1840s, is red on the outside but if you roast it and slice it you find concentric circles of pink and white inside, visually stunning in your beet plate composition. Its flavor is milder, and it does not need to cook as long.
Recipes for beets abound. You can boil larger beets until tender, peel and slice them, and layer in alternating colors with goat cheese, dribbled with a olive oil, lemon, and herb dressing, to serve on lettuce as a very attractive appetizer. You can, as the Times suggested last week, try a grated raw beet salad: I would suggest using younger, smaller, sweeter beets for this. Or you can consult any Jewish or Russian cookbook for a simple beet borscht recipe, refreshingly cold, with sour cream and dill, on a hot summer day. —Mark ScherzerFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
