We’ve suddenly found ourselves consuming a lot of beetroot juice since we purchased our juicer in April. Beetroot is not only delicious, like, it’s, you know, mega healthy as well! Aces.

We got to thinking: “What is it about this purple beet which makes it root in the heart of healthy eating society?” Some say the Beet Generation writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Enid Blyton, were so fond of beetroots (which they’d eat all the thyme when out on the road getting lost, wasted, or stuck in violent fights with violent strangers) they named their literary movement after them. Cripes!

The weird thing about juicing (NB: If you have no idea what juicing is, it’s where you juice stuff for its juice) is you really get an understanding of how tough vegetables are. And we mean tough in the Arnold Schwarzenegger sense. Cucumber? Soft as cake! Carrots? Sliced and diced like a pot of jelly! Apples? Demolished like when you hit that really big snake during Snakes & Ladders and get sent back to the start. Beetroot? One tough SOB!

Now we think this outright toughness stems from beetroot’s existence in the ground. As it has to live in the earth it has to fight off worms, moles, tetchy bits of mud, and awkward rocks. Think about it – if you lived in the mud you’d be a bit on the rough side of things. So this is where beetroot gets its violent edge from.

As to why it’s yellow… well, one theory has it that children’s TV character Barney the Dinosaur had once eaten a bad batch of stegosaurus 200 million years ago, and puked up on the world’s stockpile of beetroot (which used to be located in Barnsley). Subsequently the beets were forever tainted. By ‘eck!