Sugar Beets

Sugar Beets

This article relates to Beta Vulgaris

In Beta Vulgaris — titled after the scientific name for sugar beets — workers come to Minnesota from across the country to work long shifts on big machines called pilers to harvest the crop. Is that what you picture when you hear the term "sugar beets"? Me neither — I always imagined deep red or borscht, but as it might appear in Candyland, and I assumed you plucked it from the ground like an earthen lollipop.

Alas, the sugar beet comes in the more humble form of a brown root vegetable that pretty much looks like a bigger carrot. All beets belong to beta vulgaris — which just means "common" or "ordinary." (Sorry.) They're usually around a foot long and weigh 2-5 lbs. Looking at photos of the drab, starchy inside, it's hard to imagine anyone realizing there is actually pure sugar there. However, most sugar beets contain around 18% sucrose, and getting it is as simple as boiling the beet to extract the syrup.

There's some debate over who was the first to discover this and cultivate sugar beets for that purpose. What's certain is that during the Napoleonic Wars of the mid-1800s, Britain blocked Europe's access to the West Indies, which meant they couldn't import sugar cane. Enterprising Europeans began using sugar beets instead, and factories sprang up as the demand increased. Sugar beet factories were established in the United States not long after.

The sugar found in sugar beets is the same as that found in sugar cane, and it takes a lot more work to harvest a sugar beet (as you know if you've read Beta Vulgaris). Yet, there are some good reasons to cultivate sugar beets, especially for farmers. They grow in temperate or even cold areas where sugar cane wouldn't. Furthermore, growing crops that contain sugar is much more lucrative than growing crops that don't: in Minnesota, for instance, farmers of sugar beets net over seven times the income of those who work with non-sugar crops! In 2023, the United States produced around 35 million tons of sugar beets. In addition to sugar, the crop is used for animal feed, and can be converted into ethanol. Sugar beets that are deemed "not food grade," sometimes known as "energy beets," are turned into fuel via fermentation. While corn is still the primary source of food-based ethanol, beets show a lot of promise because their natural sugar helps with the fermentation process.

Sugar beets aren't typically a direct-to-consumer product for food or other purposes. They do contain fiber and other minerals, but their high sugar content limits their nutritional prowess. The sugar that cane and beets provide is structurally identical, seeing as both have been refined. There is one major aesthetic and ethical difference, though. As it's sold in stores, cane sugar is pure white in color, something usually achieved by processing it with bone char (a bone-based charcoal that removes impurities), whereas beet sugar is not. Some vegans exclusively use beet sugar for this reason.

Even if you don't decide to head up to Minnesota to work the beet piler (look at a picture of that thing!), it's good to know a little more about sugar beets. At the very least, I hear they come in handy during Napoleonic wars.

Illustration of beta vulgaris from Atlas des plantes de France (1891) by Amédée Masclef, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Filed under Nature and the Environment

This article relates to Beta Vulgaris. It first ran in the February 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.