Aio, quantitas magna frumentorum est

- Yes, that is a very large amount of corn

The Oregonian ran a large photo today on the front of its "Living" section, of a young school girl or boy (one can never be too sure) looking disdainfully down at his or her school-lunch tray. There in a side pocket adjacent to a slice of pizza was a dark round splotch, a perfect round dark dot which could have been a perfect hole in the Universe, a Black Hole if you would were it not for the captioning. It was in fact nothing as exciting as a Black Hole, it was in fact a thick slice of freshly boiled beet.

It seems, according to the story accompanying this child's look of desperation, that the Portland School District has decided its students are not getting enough fruits or vegetables in their diets, and therefore have decided to augment the daily fare with a dollop of some local, fresh, organic vegetable. Like it or not. After all, what possibly could be a better compliment to cheese and pepperoni pizza than a squirmy, slimy, red-staining slice of beet.

Anyone knowing me well knows that to me the Beet is a particularly horrifying piece of vegetation best left in the ground. There is no reason to dig some things up, let alone boil them and then put them in your mouth. Beets are for punishment. I do remember sitting at the dining room table with beets on my plate, probably put there by my Dad who believed that everyone should try something once. This despite the fact there were many things Dad would not allow anyplace near his own plate. Nope, I do recall sitting there at the table long after the dining room lights were turned off, and while I have tasted beets a few times over the years just to see if my priorities might have changed, they most certainly had not been changed by that slimy round of boiled root there in the dark.

So I felt a particular affinity toward this child in the picture, standing there with his or her beet staring up like a giant period at the end of a particularly bold statement. I could only imagine what was going through that mind...where can it be hidden, whose plate can I sneak it onto. What kind of trouble would I be in if I hurl it across the lunchroom to skitter across the tables like a skipping-stone leaving a trail of blood-red juice. Hmmm.

The paper did note that very few of the students chose to taste the vegetable accompanying their pizza. I have to wonder how many of the rounds were hurled in a food-fight coup de gras....I would actually have enjoyed seeing the carnage following that bloodly food-fight. It would after all these years seem like true justice for the years of torment the unholy Beet had stained my life.