Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

TODAY'S SPECIAL

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 is the ancient ancestor of the
autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded
moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once
connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.