The humble beet is probably best known for the fear that it generates in the minds of kids when confronted with beets at the dinner table. Most kids think beets taste like dirt and they’d pretty much rather go hungry thank you very much. But the beet actually is something that’s incredibly important in human history particularly in the realm of social justice and human freedom and is worth knowing about. Confused? Let me try to explain. Beets were first cultivated in the Mediterranean region and they were a salad crop, a leaf crop used by the Romans. The plant almost certainly looked exactly like this with a very, very large leaf blade similar to today’s Swiss chard. This leaf crop was cultivated throughout the Mediterranean for many, many centuries but as people began to move out of the Mediterranean region into northern Europe they looked for a vegetable that could be stored over winter much like today we’d be interested in a vegetable that could be stored in a root cellar. And selection during many centuries resulted in a plant that became the modern table beet. Table beets have a swollen root. That swollen root comes from photosynthate produced in these leaves which look very much like the Swiss chard leaves but are slightly reduced in size that is shunted down into this root. This root contains water and sugar, which can then be used as a propogule stored over winter in a pit or stored over winter later in a root cellar. And the modern table beet then became an important vegetable that many people in northern Europe could eat. It did have a certain amount of sweetness to it, a certain amount of sucrose in that root. But it was not that sweet and it was consistent with what we would think of in many vegetables today. In fact, if you were interested in a source of sweetness in that time in human history about the only product you could have used was honey. And so as people’s interest in sweetness became more prominent people looked for a plant that could do that and the only plant that was available to humankind at that time that could produce commercially a large-scale sugar was sugar cane. Sugar cane was produced originally in the Middle East and later in the West Indies. Slave grown, slave cultivated mainly by English and French colonies. A British naval blockade during the Napoleonic wars cut France off from a source of sugar. France no longer could get access to it’s very cheap sugar in the West Indies and so Napoleon offered a prize for anybody that could come up with a domestic source of sugar in Europe. People tried potato, people tried turnip, but eventually, selection in beet for higher levels of sucrose resulted in a plant in the 18th century called the modern sugar beet - a very large brown root that was filled with sucrose. The availability of commercial sugar from beet made it possible for Europe to move away from slave grown cultivated cane sugar for which there were tremendous human atrocities associated with that particular plant to a domestic source of sugar that could be produced from sugar beet. And that then became a way to for the abolitionist movement that was very prominent in the nineteenth century and emancipation movements across the world to replace slave grown sugar cultivation with a domestic source of sugar. Today beet sugar represents fifty percent of world sugar. But what about the humble root vegetable that I mentioned earlier? Beet is a minor vegetable crop in the United States. It is a particularly important crop in certain parts of the world like Eastern Europe but most of the world associates beet with its intense red color. The red pigments actually turn out to be more than just for food and more than just for products like Borsht but can be dried and used as pigments that can be added to food - in yogurt, ice cream, and even potato chips to make them colorful and that is even done here in the Midwestern United States. Most kids though will tell you they still don’t like beets because they taste like dirt. Beet actually is a plant that interacts with Streptomyces bacteria in the soil to produce compounds called Geosmins. Geosmins are the compounds responsible for the earthy flavors in beet and they are also responsible for the smell of freshly plowed soil. On a spring day, walking around, seeing farmers out in the field, smelling that freshly plowed soil, those Geosmins are the same compounds that make beets taste like dirt. But many people look for other characteristics in their food. Some people will can them; some people will pickle them, ultimately though my recommendation to you is to roast them. Roasting brings out the great qualities, the great flavors, and also the sugars in beet, which are actually at the core of freedom and social justice that make up the core of this humble root vegetable. Thank you very much. {Applause}