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
I will be enjoying some cold beets on a salad tonight. My bride upon leaving today for a 4 day trip went through the fridge with me. “Now there is spaghetti sauce, lentil soup, carrot soup, and these beets, make sure you eat the beets” “Right, got it, take the sauce out of the freezer”
My Mother use to make pickled beets and onions. These were real good cold..
PIckled beets and onions are a fave in my home to this day. We get the commercial varieties when we can find them. Too darned lazy to cook the things.
forgot to tell you the beets and onions were cooked before being pickled.
Peel them and chop them and steam them and eat them with butter. They use beets to treat cancer in some places in Europe, or so I’ve read. Also a little beet juice mixed with carrot juice makes a zinger of a drink. Not too much, beet juice is so intense it’s like some kind of drug.
Who knew beets were so popular? ; )
I myself suspect they come from Space.