A Different Beet
As the nation’s only university-based plant breeder of table beets, Irwin Goldman is pushing this loved and loathed vegetable in new directions (GROW MAGAZINE)
Last fall, when the “Gastropod” podcast came to UW–Madison to participate in the 2018 Wisconsin Science Festival, hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley asked Irwin Goldman PhD’91 to be a guest on the live show. A professor and chair in the horticulture department, Goldman is a plant breeder and geneticist who focuses on carrots, onions, and beets, and outreach is a regular part of his job. Naturally, he said yes.
Many people enjoy learning about vegetables, and Goldman loves talking about them — and he’s good at it, always ready to serve up fun facts and stories with a dash of science. He’s a popular teacher and a sought-after media expert. You may have heard him on the radio — he’s been a regular guest on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Garden Talk” for decades, one half of the veggie expert duo known as the “Vicars of Vegetables.”
To help prepare for his “Gastropod” appearance, Goldman met up with Graber and Twilley at the UW Carrot and Beet Lab, where he stores the materials and tools for his plant breeding programs. As they sampled a variety of carrots — the focus of the upcoming show — the conversation shifted to the subject of beets.
“Cynthia told me that she doesn’t eat beets,” recalls Goldman. “She said, ‘I hate beets. I can’t stand them.’”
For Goldman, who loves beets right down to the center of their “beet-y” little hearts, it’s a discouraging sentiment. But it’s one he’s heard many times before. If one of Goldman’s vegetables needs a champion, it’s definitely the beet. It’s a rather polarizing plant.
To many children, beets are pickled horrors that should be avoided at all costs. To some, they constitute peasant food, a steaming bowl of magenta borscht. To others, they are the star attraction of a gourmet salad, roasted to perfection and tossed with arugula and goat cheese in a vinaigrette dressing.
“If you talk to consumers about beets, you’ll find a few people that say they love them and can’t get enough of them, but you’ll find many more who say, ‘I can’t stand them because they taste like dirt,’” says Goldman.
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