Deep Purple-Red Heart Love

I love beets. I love them pureed in soups, love them in salads, love them grated and sautéed as side dishes, love them juiced mixed in with carrot, apple, and ginger. City Baby also highly recommends pureed beet cubes for baby.

Eating beets is definitely a smart nutritional move. Beets are an excellent source of folate and manganese and, like many veggies, a good source of fiber, vitamin C, potassium, and magnesium.

Yet there is some odd nutritional lore surrounding beets. The New Whole Foods Encyclopedia by Rebecca Woods states that, when eating beets, “pink urine may indicate an iron deficiency while magenta stool may indicate adequate iron. . . . As their color suggests, beets are a blood tonic and are good for anemia, the heart, and circulation. They purify the blood, alleviate constipation, aid the liver, and promote menstruation.”

The iron claim is pure myth. Beets only have 0.7 mg of iron per ½ cup serving, about 4% of our daily needs. And, as most beet eaters know, you’ll end up with both pink urine and magenta stool so you can hardly assess your blood iron levels from that (especially since iron isn’t pink or magenta).

The source of that blood tonic claim is likely the source of the beet’s purple-red color – betalains, a recently discovered class of dietary antioxidants, found primarily in red beets and prickly pears (nature makes for odd nutritional bedfellows).

Betalains include two classes of compounds: betacyanins, which are red violet, and betaxanthins, which are yellow, both of which were shown to have powerful antioxidant properties. Just small amounts were found to inhibit lipid peroxidation and heme decomposition. That’s a fancy way of saying that they reduce oxidation of blood fats, reducing the threat of clogged arteries, and they protect the iron that is carried by red blood cells. So in a roundabout way, beets really are a blood tonic since they protect against arterial and blood cell damage.

On a non-betalain note, another claim for beets that seems to be true is that eating beets is excellent for reducing constipation, probably due to the type of soluble fibers in the root.

So eat, enjoy, and don’t be alarmed when, later, things come out a little pink or purple.

What's in Season

Here in Chicago, the farmer's market season is only a few weeks old. My small northside farmer's market doesn't yet have a wide variety of veggies (but lots of strawberries and cherries). But I'm not despairing. The season is young. If you're wondering when to expect what veggies this season and live in Illinois, wonder no more with these official and unofficial Illinois lists. Here are some additional lists for my friends in California, Washington, New York , and Massachusetts – and for my mother in New Hampshire. If anyone else has some good seasonality lists, feel free to share.

If you're also wondering what it's like to be a farmer's market farmer, I recommend reading It's a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life by Keith Stewart. I was initially drawn to the book by its premise of a middle-aged man quitting his NYC job to become a Hudson Valley organic veggie farmer. I love all tales of mid-life career changes, especially those involving food. What the book ends up being is a very balanced, thoughtful, and well-written depiction of what your farmer's market farmers go through to bring their tasty veggies to a market near you.