red

Beets in any form are, strictly speaking, a food for the rougher sort of cow. Their one merit from the human point of view is that alcohol may be extracted from them. The main trouble is that beets contain 85 percent of concrete. I once boiled a couple of them during an entire afternoon without the slightest result—if anything, they seemed to get harder. Turn, gouge, and glare at them as I would, not one single gleam of intelligence could I get from those beets. In the evening I forked them again, but they had apparently made up their minds to be stubborn, and my own blood was up too. Finally I forgot the water and they were left high and dry. I have always felt that the joke was on them. I must confess that I am against beet soup, too, especially cold. Cold beet soup always gives me the decided impression that life is just a grim joke of the gods, and adding sour cream to it doesn’t help much. The fact that the people who put sour cream in cold beet soup are Lithuanians seems a very flimsy excuse.

—Will Cuppy, How To Be Hermit