Beets Resprouting

It’s amazing. After a long winter of storage these beets are bursting with life. As a kid, I remember taking potatoes with toothpicks and sitting them in a glass of water to sprout. Sounds lame when you compare that to surfing the web for half pipes in San Diego or looking for used laboratory equipment for your next science project on eBay.

I can’t find anything about eating or preparing resprouting beets, or other vegetables for that matter, but I have to guess that they’re at the market for a reason. Does anyone know how to prepare resprouting veggies?

Shoppers love to touch food. They touch for freshness and to smell and to taste. They touch for the sake of feeling something that is as essential as the air we breathe. They are the unseen human presence in my market images and constantly changing the landscapes I capture here.

What happened in front of my lens today is a real lesson in serendipity. Just a few seconds later, this tableaux was gone.

Forever.

For all the thousands of photographs I have taken here since I started shooting in the Union Square market (a quick count shows about 2300 since June), this image is a gift.

Fresh Beets from Union Square Market

Beets are one of those foods folks either love or hate. I love ‘em. Roasted with goat cheese and grilled chicken in a salad on a hot summer evening.

I took these guys back to the studio to give them their proper respect (thanks Aretha!) and then shoved them in the oven for an hour or so, wrapped in aluminum foil.