Tim Robbins on Red Beets

 (This is from the book “Jitterbug perfume”, Tom Robbins writes almost like a lunatic but he’s hilarious.)

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, 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 can't 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 was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes...

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure...
An old Ukranian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."

That is a risk we have to take.”