cc >> Cassie Immel: Thank you for watching Wednesday Nite at the Lab this evening. Tonight we have Irwin Goldman. He's going to be talking about The Beet: The Health and Nutrition and Social Justice of the Under-appreciated Root Vegetable. Mr. Goldman has worked at the university here since 1992, and he is currently a professor of horticulture. From 2004 through 2010 he served in the administration of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences as an assistant associate vice and interim dean. His work focuses on breeding and genetics of vegetable crops, primarily the carrot, onion and the table beet. Together with his students, he has studied the intersection between vegetables and human  health, often in interdisciplinary terms. Irwin holds a bachelor of science in agriculture science from the University of Illinois, a master's in crop science from North Carolina State, and a PhD in plant breeding and plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin. He was a postdoctoral research associate in maize genetics at the University of Illinois. So without further adieu, I present to you Mr. Irwin Goldman. 

>> Irwin Goldman: Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Cassie, and thanks everybody for being here tonight. This is a subject that is very, very dear to my heart, and so it's an honor to the able to talk about it. I want to begin by reflecting a little bit on the tremendous focus that this country has had on immigration reform in the last year and this very famous and wonderful poem by Emma Lazarus called the New Colossus in which she said, "'Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp' cries she with silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." And probably many of you know that these wonderful words from her poem, indeed the huddled masses from Europe and elsewhere who were yearning to breathe free, came to this country 150, 120, 100 years ago, and they brought with them some of their culture which included their food. And among those foods were root vegetables which we typically associate, I think, sometimes with the huddled masses. The last 120 years or so has seen some very large changes, of course, in the way we eat. And you can be quite sure that most of our food, many of our foods would be quite unrecognizable to these immigrants in that period but some of the foods they would recognize. And I think among these are the root vegetables, the simple, staple peasant food of eastern Europe and beyond. 

And so today, as we think about this country and what we've done in welcoming these folks, I'm going to talk about one of these vegetables, the table beet, and the table beet has long been considered, I think, a perfect food for huddled masses. It's an under-appreciated vegetable with a great history that touches on, among other things, social justice. So I'll hopefully be able to demonstrate why it's worth paying attention to this very humble root of European origin. And so we'll begin our story talking a little bit about its history in relation to sugar, which is very important. And it's important to know that this plant comes from Europe. It comes from the sea coasts of Europe, primarily. And you'll see in the left-hand part of this picture a wild beet. This happens to be a species called maritima, Beta maritima, growing on the sea coast. A very salt tolerant plant. And the group of plants that we associate with the swollen root, that is sugar beet, table beet or garden beet, and fodder beet which is a crop that is fed to animals, are all Beta vulgaris, subspecies vulgaris. 

So they're all in the same genus and species. Another group closely related, same genus and species but a different subspecies, this is Beta vulgaris subspecies cycla, are the spinach beet, the Swiss chard, the leaf beet, any beet eaten for its leaves is in that group cycla. Now the beet has a genus Beta, and it's an interesting thing to ask why that might be. The seed of beet is actually an aggregate fruit, a cluster of seeds. It's a corky thing that looks like that, and it's often been compared to the Greek Beta, or the letter B, of course. And the seeds are born on these long stalks, and you can have hundreds and hundreds of individual seeds on a plant, each of which has up to seven germs. So an individual seed bulk can give rise to many plants. This plant also is a very close cousin of some important crops worldwide. And the family that these plants reside in is called the Chenopodiaceae. Chenopodiaceae includes quinoa, which is a very important grain in parts of South America, particularly in Peru. 

Huazontle, which is the leaf version or the herb version of quinoa. Lambsquarter and pigweed, which if you're anything like me you have growing on your lawn, these are very common weeds in regions like Wisconsin and probably much of the United States, much of the world, and they are closely related to the beet. Amaranth, which is both a grain crop, a very nutritious grain crop and leaf crop worldwide, and epazote, which is a leaf crop in South America. So there are many plants in this family that are quite interesting to people. We'll only focus on one or two of them today but there's a lot of to say about them. Now, if you look at the picture on the right of the slide you'll see a very early depiction. This is a drawing that goes back more than a thousand years. It is a progenitor of beet. So you can see it's mostly leaf. And you'll see a slight swollenness to that root down there. 

This was originally, this plant was used by people in Europe, in the Mediterranean region primarily, as a salad crop. This was an herb or a salad crop, and it was used medicinally by some of those people as well, by the Greeks and by the Romans, and you find lots of descriptions of that. But you'll notice, very characteristically of this very early depiction, that there is no swollen root, that happened much later. The swollen rooted types, that is the types that we associate with beet today, Weren't found until about the 16th century. When they occurred, we don't know in domestication, but they were first described in the 16th century. And it's very likely that these plants, these salad crops, moved from the Mediterranean up into northern Europe, and as they did, people needed to select for a swollen root. A swollen root could be stored over winter so it could be kept. A swollen root was a propagule, essentially, that you could keep and a vegetable that you could keep. So there are many examples in the vegetable universe of such transformations. There were also, during that period, hybridization between the swollen-rooted type and the leaf type. 

And that created a whole series of crops. One of those crops was called mangel. And by the middle of the 18th century in Germany, there was good description of this plant called mangel which was a very large, much larger root that could then be used not only for feeding people over winter but also for feeding livestock, and there are very good descriptions of that. So we really have three things going on. We have a leaf crop moving into northern Europe. We have the selection for a swollen-rooted form that people could eat and then also their animals. The sugar beet, which is pictured in the lower right part of the slide, is actually derived from crosses between the leaf form and the vegetable form in that time period. So the sugar beet is only a few hundred years old. And it's a very, very recent crop. It was identified at that time that there were a syrup you could produce from the table beet that was a syrup that was sweet, and it was a chemist, Margraff, who identified that substance, or the sweetness in that substance, as being sucrose. 

And this slide sort of takes you through some of the time period. Really beginning in about the early 17th century you have this syrup being identified and Margraff, the chemist in the 18th century, identifying that as sucrose. This was in Prussia. Achard then begins essentially a government-supported breeding program selecting for higher levels of sucrose, higher levels sugar in beet, and eventually they create, in the late 18th century they create a cultivar, really the first cultivar, which was really the beginning of sugar beet. Later they went on to do mass selection for sucrose, a very classic plant breeding technique that allowed them to increase sucrose levels to very, very high amounts and actually create the modern sugar beet. Now, there's a very interesting side story which is that Napoleon, when France was blocked from a cheap source of sugar from the West Indies during the Napoleonic wars, he offered a sugar prize of 10,000 francs, which was a lot of money, to anybody who could create a domestic source of sugar. Now the prize went to somebody who had the idea of creating or extracting sucrose from potato. I don't even thing there's very much sucrose in a potato, it was a very bad idea, and I don't know if that went anywhere. Nevertheless, it gives you a feeling for the pressure that was on Europe to come up with a source of sugar when they couldn't import from their colonies. So that really drove some of this work in Germany and in other places to develop a domestic source of sugar, and the modern sugar beet was created. 

So remember though that the table beet, the vegetable form, crossed with the leaf form and the selection for sucrose really was the beginning of this now incredibly important crop that delivers half of the world's sugar. Sugar beet is responsible for half the world's sugar now. So the table beet has a really important role in this whole story. We'll come back to that in just a moment. This is a great painting by Emile Claus, and it's a painting from 1890 called The Beet Harvest. And you see here French farmers harvesting, this is actually in winter scene, harvesting sugar beets here, they're actually chopping them out of the ground, chopping them probably out of the frozen ground. This became an incredibly important, then, domestic source of sugar for Europe. Now, there is a strong desire we all have, our brains are just hard-wired for sweetness. We are attracted to this, and I think it's very, very hard, of course it plays into many of the current discussions about obesity and diabetes and many of the things that plague our western world now. But there is a very strong desire for sugar. 

And of course if you were-- before sugar beet and before sugar cane, honey really was your only, your main natural sweetener and of course we still have. But sugar cane came on in a very early period, long before beet. And it's a tropical Asian crop that was introduced to Spain by Arab traitors. And Columbus, of course, is responsible to bringing it to this part of the world. He brought it to Hispaniola in the 15th century. And by the 17th century it became a dominant Caribbean crop, of course largely based on slave production which we'll come back to in just a second. But it was around that time of the 17th century that Europeans began to consume sugar products in a very large way. And then it became Europe's main source of sugar based on this colonial world. Just to give you a sense for how important this was, this is a silver sugar box from Germany. This was a prize commodity. 

This was like gold. And it was very expensive. It was very, initially, of course, only the upper classes could afford it. Later it became less expensive. But it was a very, very special prized commodity. And today, of course, as I mentioned it's a dominant crop, really a valuable crop in providing half the world's sugar. Now of course it has a very dark history. And many of you know the story of colonial sugar production on plantations in the West Indies which were French colonies, British colonies and other colonies. And these images here depict some of those scenes. In the middle, of course, is a picture of a slave ship. 

This is a very famous diagram of a slave ship bringing to the attention of the world the very harsh conditions that the slaves were under just in the passage alone. The picture on the right is a famous picture of sugar cane production. You can see the sugar cane in the background there that's being cultivated by slave labor on plantations. And the book on the far left, Bury the Chains, a book by Adam Hochschild, is an outstanding book about the abolitionist movement in England during this period. And it talks a lot about, not only about sugar cane cultivation, but about the political movement to move away from slavery, which is a fabulous story. Nevertheless, it's important to say that as sugar beet became dominant in Europe, this provided a domestic source of sugar that freed up, in a sense, did not rely on the colonies to import sugar. So this had an important role in the ending of slavery. Of course, this whole history, some of you may be familiar with the triangle trade which was really the sale of manufactured goods, or the transport of manufactured goods from New England to Africa, slaves then moving from Africa to the Caribbean, and molasses, which is a sense essentially liquid sugar, from the Caribbean to New England, and that triangle trade went on, sadly, for many, many centuries. So just to conclude this portion of the presentation, I think that the beet, especially of course taking those vegetable beet, making those crosses with leaf beet, selecting for high sucrose, ended up having a very significant role in supplanting sugar cane and making Europe self-sufficient. And I think then, hopefully, also in ending slavery. 

I want to talk a little bit about consuming these plants as a vegetable. And many of you would be familiar with beets probably as a canned product, which, although I'm a big fan of vegetables, I have to say is not necessarily the best way. But cans or jars, you might have seen them and this happens to be a typical brand you might see. I will say that Wisconsin produces more table beets than any other state. We produce more than half of the nation's crop. It's not a lot acreage-wise, it's not a lot tonnage-wise, but I think it's still a very nice claim to fame for Wisconsin. Of course, there's a great history of canning and processing vegetables in this state. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, this is a great picture of the inside of a canning factory around the turn of the 20th century. Here's a picture of the Waukesha Canning Company. It says 1908 to 1912. 

This was a viner. A viner was a machine that strips the pods off the peas or beans, and that's in the background, and here's the crew at Sussex, Wisconsin. So this is a great, great sort of part of Wisconsin agriculture is vegetable processing. And of course beets were an important part of that. One of the nice things about being able to process something like beets compared to sweet corn is that, of course sweet corn you have to harvest it and process it quickly. Beets you can put in a huge pile and leave them for months at a time and process them as you're ready. Of course, they're also bound up in the history of home gardening, the victory gardens that you're all familiar with. This happens to be a great poster from victory garden, encourage people to grow and can their own vegetables. And, of course, beets were an important part of this during the war and after. There are some fabulous labels like there are for many crops. 

I can't quite explain them. This is Maryland Chief, a picture of a Native American with beets here. And, of course, this is an interesting cultural mix. But there are lots of great examples of these products that have been produced over the century. And of course beet is an international crop, it's important in Europe and it's important in Asia, particularly in India where there are a number of very interesting dishes that depend on beets. This happens to be beet halwa or halva, if you're familiar with it from the Middle Eastern. This is kind of a sesame cake, a pressed sesame product which includes beets and is a very beautiful dish. And here's beet chutney. So you'll find it all over and you'll find it woven into the fabric of all sorts of cultures that you might not expect. The most famous, of course, is borscht, which is written in Polish as BARSZCZ as only the Poles can do. 

It's a very hard word to spell. This happens to be a borscht recipe with this wonderful picture of this young woman and the beets falling from the sky. But borscht is perhaps the most famous beet dish. Its intensity in color and its intensity in flavor is something that's extremely characteristic, and many of you have probably heard of it. There's also, of course, the borscht belt where a lot of people consume this. This happens to be a picture of the Grandview Hotel. For those of you who aren't familiar with the borscht belt, this is the sort of resort area in the Catskills many of these eastern European folks went to. An example of borscht belt humor would be something like a guy goes to the doctor and says, "I'm not feeling well." And the doctor says, "You're sick, you're ill." And the guys says, "I'd like a second opinion." And the doctor says, "Okay, you're ugly too." [LAUGHTER] That's the borscht belt, and this was a place where you could probably get these kinds of foods. Now, in modern times, in recent years, this has become, the beet has become a gourmet item. I will say that at some point in the late '90s, Martha Stewart began incorporating beets into her recipes. 

And it was in Gourmet Magazine and it was in Bon Appetit and it was in Cooks Illustrated, all of these gourmet dishes with beets, sometimes you'll see it with goat, here it's paired with goat cheese, but you'll see both red and yellow beets in this picture. And all of the sudden I'm the only person in the public sector in the United States that works on beets and so you have to call somebody. So they would call me and it's really quite, there's a beet renaissance going on. I guess it's still happening, and we find a lot of people using these. This is gorgonzola cheese and beets and roasted walnuts. So here is the latest incarnation of this old, sort of peasant food, if you want to call it, as a gourmet item. It's really fascinating, and of course it's a beautiful vegetable with lots to offer that we'll talk about. So it's really nice to see it in this way. Now a couple of things about eating beets, and this is probably a caution for all of you now, some of you may have experienced or know people who have experienced the phenomenon of beeturia. Now beeturia is a medically described phenomenon, but it is the inability to absorb the pigments in beet. 

About 10% to 14% of the adult population have this trait where you excrete the pigments rather than absorb them. And so it is common for physicians to get an alarmed phone call from new parents, for example, who are feeding a toddler or feeding an infant beets. They see the red color come out and they're afraid that it's blood. It happens in adults as well. And so beeturia, sorry to have to bring this information to you, ladies and gentlemen, but it is a scientific fact, there it is. But environmental factors are also important in the way that we absorb this. Iron deficiency increases it. Oxalic acid, which I'll talk about in a moment, also increases it. But it is something that you need to know about if you're a beet consumer. Another oddity about beets is that they have an incredibly high requirement for boron. 

This happens to be a picture of boron deficiency in beets. This may be of no interest to any of you, unless you're a gardener, unless you're interested in producing the crop, but these plants and related plants have a very high requirement for the element boron in the soil. So you sometimes need to fertilize with boron. And as a result, the plants, they absorb a lot of boron. So they have a very unusual nutritional profile partly because of that. Couple of other odd things about beets. You'll notice in the paper, this happens to be from the Dayton Daily News a couple of years ago, some Ohio roads will get beet juice mix to help keep ice at bay. Liquid helps the brine mixtures work more effectively in lower temperatures; it is also more green friendly. You'll see that municipalities around the country are using beet juice and beet extract on the roads in the winter as a way to really to reduce ice. Fortunately, this is not from the table beet because if it were from the table beet we'd have red-streaked roads, this doesn't build confidence in the driving public. 

So this is really a sugar beet product. But even as late as last week I got a call from some municipality asking about how red beets are used and doesn't the color bother people. I will say also that there is, in the Chenopodiaceae family, some very odd sports. This happens to be practiced in the British Isles. Who can explain it? Mangel hurling. I mean, who can imagine that people do this? But nevertheless, there it is, it's kind of like lacrosse. Thankfully, they do not use beets for this yet, and I would the not recommend using such a beautiful vegetable for this sport. Finally, I'll say that sugar beets have been in the news as late as last week. This is from August 13th, so that is last week. Maybe some of you saw this. 

It was in the Wall Street Journal. It was in the New York Times. And this was a federal judge who revoked the government's approval for genetically engineered sugar beet. The USDA had approved genetically engineered sugar beet for use by farmers and 95% of the US sugar beet crop this year was planted to genetically engineered sugar beet. That was revoked by a judge as being, saying that the USDA hadn't approved this properly, and so they have to go back to the drawing board. The current crop can be harvested but no new genetically engineered sugar beets can be produced until all the USDA does its environmental impact statement and does many more things. We can talk about that later, but it's a very, very interesting thing to see that we have genetically engineered corn, we have genetically engineered soy bean, we have genetically engineered cotton, we have genetically engineered beets in the field today, but we will not next season. Very, very interesting development. There are no genetically engineered table beets at this point nor are there any efforts, that I'm aware of, to produce them. I want to now, as we're talking about eating, turn our attention to geosmin. 

Geosmin is a word that refers to the earthy scent and the earthy smell of this crop. Now, those of you who have eaten beets or if you're a connoisseur of beets, you know that they have a taste, a unique taste, some people will say they taste like dirt, which is exactly right. Geosmins are compounds that are the smell of the earth. And Tom Robbins the author, we wrote a wonderful book called Jitterbug Perfume, and I'll read you his quote. "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." And in this book, in this wonderful book about, it was called Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins has, it's a quest for scents, new perfumes and the beet plays a central role. And it's that earthy quality that it has, that sort of soil-like smell and taste you find in spinach, which is also a Chenopodiaceae vegetable, same family, you find it in Swiss chard, that's from geosmin. And geosmin is a very simple, a very, very simple molecule that is actually produced by certain bacteria, particularly streptomyces bacteria. 

And these streptomyces bacteria live in the soil. And so the smell of freshly plowed earth, when you turn over the earth in the spring, that incredible scent, which every Gardner and every farmer must just relish, that is geosmin. And so there are fish, particularly catfish or other bottom dwelling fish, that have an association with those bacteria because they live in the bottoms of lakes and rivers. They cause the earthy flavors that you'll sometimes, which are really off flavors in fish, but in vegetables they tend to be earthy flavors that we like. Now we don't really know why these bacteria associate with vegetables from this family. We don't know if the bacteria are living in the vegetable or just living in the soil around it. I actually have a small project in my lab now where we're actually going to begin to study geosmins and try to figure out what actually happens. But the fact is that there is this unusual association. The fact is this is one of the things about this vegetable that people both love and hate. I would say that this is the thing that most people say either I don't like beets because they taste like dirt or I like them because they're earthy. 

And this is all about the geosmins. Recently, the genome sequence of these streptomyces was completed. There is a lot known at the molecular level about how they work. And there are some wonderful people in this country and in Europe who study it. And so we hope to make some interesting inquiries into how this unique association takes place. I want to talk about color because beet, if you've ever cooked with it or you've ever eaten it, you know you just put it on your plate and you can pretty much guarantee that everything else on your plate is going to turn red. So they have this fabulous pigment that I referred to a number of times and the color is just outstanding. Now beets are colored by pigments called betalains, and betalains come in an array of colors. This happens to be the petioles of Swiss chard. And this is the cultivar Bright Lights, which you've probably seen. 

It's a beautiful array of colors, but you've got yellows, you've got orange, you've got pink, you've got red, you've got non-pigmented, this is really a palette of colors all caused about these betalain pigments. And this is basically how it works. There is a molecule called L-DOPA. L-DOPA is a psychoactive molecule actually, maybe could explain one of the reasons why I like beets. But anyway L-DOPA is in there. And L-DOPA is cyclized, and it produces an intermediate called betadine, and that then gets turned into betacyanin, which is a purple color. When you cut open a red beet and you look at it, you're actually seeing, you see red but there are two colors in there. There's red and there's yellow. About 75% of that color is red, and about 25% of that color is yellow. But the reddish part is caused by that purplish betacyanin, and the yellow is caused by betaxanthin. 

And so two molecules of DOPA produce a molecule of betacyanin. One molecule of DOPA produces a molecule of betaxanthin. And so if you turn off the red, if you turn off the gene that's producing the red color, you produce only yellow. So you have that beautiful golden beet that's pictured there. If you have them both on, then you produce the beet that you know of. Or you can have pigmentation just in the petioles, or you can have pigmentation just in the roots. And you can see that picture on the upper left, the pigmentation there is just in the roots and not in the petioles. So you can almost paint these however you like by crossing and using the genes that are available. Now, the use of synthetic dyes in the United States is controversial, and in the 1970s synthetic red number 2 was banned as a suspected carcinogen. Today we have red 40. 

It's in almost every processed food product where there's red color, and red 40 is also a suspected carcinogen. Two of my predecessors, Warren Gabelman, and Joe von Elbe, they're both retired, one from the Department of Horticulture, the other from the Department of Food Science, spent a lot of time in canning factories in the 1970s and 1980s, and they noticed all this just red color all over the place, and they were very interested to see if you could use that red color as a food dye, as a natural food dye. And so they actually worked with some of the Wisconsin processors of beets to concentrate that red color into a juice, and then it was sold, in the 1970s actually it was sold to companies who used it in their products. And Jell-O gelatin was actually colored red for a couple of years with beet juice in the 1970s. But, there are a couple things wrong with that. First of all it has a very limited stability. It's very poor. It's not light stable. It's not heat stable. And so you can only use it in dried products. 

You can only use it in ice cream and yogurt and cold products. And also it's expensive. It was expensive at the time to grind up beets and extract the color and put it into food products. So Gabelman began a breeding program in the late 1970s, early 1980s, with his students to select for high levels of this. Just like they selected for high levels of sucrose in beets, they selected for high levels of the betalain pigment. And I've continued that work since 1992. Today we have over five-fold increase in color compared to the regular beet. So when you cut open the beets that we have today, they're almost black inside with this high level of pigment. And you can see that sometimes the pigment colors the foliage, and we have some strains that are extremely pigmented here even in the foliage. So as we're selecting for high color, we have entire plants that turn red. 

So the synthetic dye, the red 40 costs less. About 10 times less than the natural dye if you were making it from a regular beet. But if you have a five-fold increase in color, which we've been able to achieve, the price isn't that much higher. So there's a cost competitiveness through breeding that we've been able to achieve partly because the FDA has some very strict rules about the use of colorants, natural colorants. You're only allowed to really make a juice concentrate. You can take a fruit or vegetable in this country, you can press it, squeeze it, get the juice out, boil off the water or filter out some of the solids. That's really all you're allowed to do by law. There's actually laws for this. And so given that current situation, it's actually quite cost-effective to select for high color and to do it that way. And this has actually been commercialized from our program starting with the work of Gabelman and von Elbe, continuing on now with me, this has been commercialized, the technology went to WARF, was licensed then back to company that then takes this out into the food industry and sublicenses it for the use in products where you want a natural red color. 

One of the places where it appears is Terra Chips, that red chip in Terra Chips is not a beet but it is colored with beet juice. You also find it in Yoplait yogurt and Ben and Jerry's ice cream. You find it in Good Humor ice cream. It's in many different products, and it is a natural red. You'll sometimes see it advertised as "won't stain," because it's a water soluble pigment, which is kind of interesting. But you'll often see it advertised as a natural color. In talking about colors, there's some fascinating things about this family. And I cannot give this presentation without mentioning nopales which are from Opuntia. This is the cactus pear. If you know this in Latin America where it's called tuna, this is a vegetable called tuna. 

It is a cactus pear itself. It is red and that is a betalain pigment. That is the same exact pigment that we have in the table beet. And actually, this is the flag of the national crest of Mexico. You can see those nopales and you can see the betalain pigments there right on their flag. This color is turned into a very useful dye called cochineal. Cochineal is actually the insect that is being farmed here. You can see these little traps. This is set for on insect on the cactus plant. This is in Mexico. 

They're farming this cochineal insect. This insect is going to feed on the leaves. It's going to absorb this betalain pigment and going to turn it into carmine. And carmine is a dye that's been used for many, many centuries. This is nothing but betalain pigment, just the same pigment we have in beets that's been transformed through the gut of this cochineal insect. And many of the famous paintings by the Italian renaissance painters. This happens to be Tintoretto, 1548. These reds are derived from cochineal. This is the Miracle of the Slave. The hats, the caps, and the robes that the cardinals wore and the coats that the red coats wore, this is the British army, this is carmine. 

This is from cochineal. So somehow they were farming this cactus pear in Mexico and in the Americas, bringing that dye to Europe. Fascinating. I don't exactly know how all that worked, but this is all dyed with cochineal and of course the robes of royalty. So nothing but a betalain pigment again consumed by an insect. Okay, I want to turn, as we come more towards the end of the presentation here I want to move towards breeding which is one of the main things that we do in our program. This is Warren Gabelman, the man I mentioned earlier who was involved in some of the early efforts to breed beets. He actually came to Wisconsin in the late 1940s and was the first person to take some of the technologies that were developed in hybrid, where corn hybrids were developed and apply those to vegetables. And he applied those to beets and was successful in developing the first beet hybrids which are now used around the world. He developed, also, some techniques that are in use around the world for breeding this crop. 

And you'll notice that we have a beet root growing in a pot, but this picture says a lot. We take beets we harvest in August or September, in fact we'll be harvesting beets starting next week and we'll be harvesting for a little while, we'll take those beets and we'll plant them, well first we'll put them in a cooler. We have to vernalize them and give them a cold treatment of, say, eight to ten weeks. We'll then take those beets and plant them in a pot, and we'll put that pot in the greenhouse out at Walnut Street and those plants will flower. And what we're looking at there is the beginning of the flower stalk of beets. And during the winter months, we'll make all our pollinations, we'll make our crosses, we'll harvest the seed in the spring and we'll put that out in the field again. So we're taking a plant that is a biennial and making it into an annual for breeding purposes. You'll also notice, if you look carefully at that beet, that there is a slice taken out of the left side of that beet. A knife went through there. We took out that part of the beet and we measured something. 

We might measure the pigment or we might measure the oxalate or we might measure some other trait. You can actually cut that thing almost completely down to just a pencil thin thing and plant that and that's enough. So it's a really great crop for breeding because you can do a lot with it. Here are the plants on a greenhouse bench with stakes in them. And those are the flowering plants where pollen is just moving. And we're doing all of our crossing and selection in the greenhouse here in Madison in the middle of winter. Now, you could do this in the field if you wanted to. It would require cages and it would require isolation, and so we find it really a nice technique to do it in the greenhouse. The hybrid technology requires male sterility, and I won't get into the details of male sterility, but I will show you the sterile flowers that we use. And the reason I'm showing you the flowers is because these sterile flowers, the reds and the pinks, have an expression of the betalain pigments for reasons we don't know. 

It's just a very interesting thing to see. A very nice diagnostic when you see that very bright pink or red color on those flowers you know you've got a sterile plant, and that sterile plant can then be used to create hybrids. The sterile cytoplasm, the sterile part of the beet that we really need in order to make hybrids work, came from a man named Owen. And he found it in sugar beet. And so this is a wonderful example, reflecting back to the beginning of the presentation are where I said that the sugar beet actually came from the table beet, now we're using the sugar beet genes to improve the table beet. It's just this great sort of circuitous way where we're using one crop to improve the other. In this case, the genes were found in sugar beet and transferred from sugar beet in 1950 which allowed for the production of F1 hybrid beet, which are now a reality around the world. Anywhere you go in the world you'll find hybrid table beet, F1 hybrid table beet growing. All the F1 hybrid table beet come from the Wisconsin program or have a genetic line from the Wisconsin program, making Wisconsin's work kind of unique. Please. 

>> What's the value of the sterility?  >> The sterility is to, so you can plant a male sterile row that will produce no pollen. And so all of the pollen that lands on it will produce hybrid seed. If you can imagine, it's like detasseling corn. You eliminate the possibility that it will self-pollinate. And so any pollen that lands on it produces a seed that's going to be a hybrid. If that makes sense. It's a kind of a very cool genetic technique for efficient hybrid seed production, and so the sterility is used in that way. The hybrids that have been produced by this program have been, as I said, used around the world. This is a hybrid that is called Big Red. You can't find it in the market so much any more, but it has been extremely popular. 

I even find people putting up signs for this when you walk around Madison. [LAUGHTER] So it's a very popular variety. Today we're doing a lot of selection for improved color, for improved yield, for improved shape. We have cylindrical beets that are more efficient for slicing. We're very interested in nutritional quality, and there's a lot to say about that and disease resistance. And also a lot of novelty colors for fresh market use. So we'll be releasing a couple of new cultivars fairly soon that are striped yellow and red on the inside. And so there are some white and red striped beets that are out there in the market, but there are no red and yellows which we hope these will be the first ones. And our program remains the only public program in the US that's currently doing this work. And I will say there's certainly a little bit of work in the private sector in the United States, not very much, and a little bit in Europe, but there isn't much work going on nationally. 

And so in order for me to have people to talk to, I tend to talk to the folks who work on sugar beet because it's about the closest we can get. So I'm going to conclude here and just review very briefly some of the things we talked about. We went from the Mediterranean region, where this crop originates, into northern Europe, where it was selected for swollen rootedness, and then elevated levels of sucrose which ended up making the sugar beet. This vegetable, which has been sort of a traditional mainstay for many cultures in eastern Europe, and then, of course, as a canning vegetable here, is undergoing a bit of a renaissance from a culinary point of view. And it's kind of neat to see some of the things that are being done. I, by the way, recommend roasting this vegetable as the single best way to produce it. My wife has come up with some great ways to do this, but the single best thing you can do, I think, is blanch it for a few minutes, put it in boiling water for a few minutes, peel off the skins, cut it and roast it in a baking pan, a very hot oven, maybe coat it with a little olive oil, a little salt and pepper, a little rosemary and it's just like oven-roasted potatoes. I think it's the best way to bring out the best flavor in a root vegetable. You can do that sweet potatoes. You can do that with potatoes. 

You can do that with carrots. It's a wonderful way to go. But anyway the vegetable is undergoing a bit of a renaissance that's nice to see. It has some very unique biology, some unknown associations with soil bacteria that we hope to figure out what's going on, and an earthiness, an earthy flavor that I think is quite interesting. And of course a whole range of things to do with color. And applications for food coloring. What's next for table beet? There was a story in last week, probably a lot of you subscribe to this online, the Ladies' Home Journal. I know I do. And the Ladies' Home Journal, Michelle Obama is on the cover, and in that she's saying she can't stand beets. "Neither the president nor I have the beet gene," she says. 

So what's next for the table beet is my search for the beet gene. [LAUGHTER] And I will be asking you to give a sample on your way out. Thanks, everybody, for your attention. I really appreciate it, and hopefully we can stay and talk a little bit about this. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]