I never ate beets as a kid—my mom, who was the cook in our
house, can’t stand ‘em—but I came to love them as an adult.
Those marvelous red (and golden, and striped, and more) root
veggies are delicious. But, there’s a variety of beets that go
through extensive processing before we eat them. The sugar beet,
as I recently learned from an episode of “How It’s Made,” is a
major commodity crop that goes through a complex series of
mechanical and biochemical steps to become white sugar and other
sweeteners. (It’s from season 9, episode 10 of How It’s Made; if
you don’t have access to full episodes on Netflix or elsewhere,
you can watch a 2-minute excerpt on beet sugar at the program’s
website, on YouTube, or below.) Beet sugar is, in fact, the
source of more sugar production in the U.S. than sugarcane. The
USDA blog recently touted the fact that researchers are using
sugar beet pulp, a byproduct of producing sugar from the root
vegetable, to produce biodegradable containers: America’s sugar
industry piles up 1 mill