b'No doubt thats why Tom Robbins started Jitterbug Perfume with this paean to the purplish cousin of the potato:The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admit-tedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You cant squeeze blood out of a turnip.The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.The beet was Rasputins favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. No such rhapsodic rant has ever been ranted about sugar beets, which are literally pale in comparison. No sugar beet, even when reaching a foot long and weighing in at 3 to 5 pounds, ever inspired a novelist or a poet. Theres nothing poetic about 29 million tons of annual sugar beets harvested in the U.S. or the several million tons of sucrose into which they are processed. 13Perhaps the only thing less poetic than sugar beets themselves is the rancorous debate about GMOs. A full 95% of U.S. sugar beets are genet-13 Sugar beets are planted on more than one million acres in the U.S.; by contrast, the table beet, or beetroot, is planted on 10,000 acres. 60'