Excerpt from Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

You Are a Sugar Beet

You have spent months becoming: pushing yourself free of hard shell, snaking your newborn fibers through the soil, sprouting leaves, amassing, absorbing, aliving yourself into something fat and bulbous and full of candied potential. You are already a survivor. You were not consumed by sugar beet maggots. You did not succumb to root madness. All that good, hard, organic work, just to wind up dead and frosted over on concrete. Not even any dirt beneath you to remind you of home.

Some say you can feel it when the machines exhume you. When your leaves are sliced off and your taproot is plucked from the ground, ripping out all your lateral roots with it. That it is a kind of pain. We don't care if you can feel it or not. We're going to do it anyway, because we are more important than you. We are your creators. We wanted certain things from you, and we made it easy for you to give us those things. It was not manipulative. It was for your own good, your species propagated like a prairie fire, more than you could have managed on your own. You are bigger, too. Heftier, and denser. You are primed for sweetness in ways that would baffle your ancestors. At some point you stopped being purely natural. When you are the way we made you, you are the way we want you. This is symbiosis: replaceable things are happier than rare things, because replaceable things do not go extinct. You have no choice but to trust us on this.

The question, ultimately, is why. You are not cheap: land and water, furnace maintenance and good press, pest control and payroll. We are one corrupt EPA inspection away from becoming another Michigan Sugar, $13.2 million in revenue kissed goodbye. Why spend so much money to bring you to life, then kill you, five billion times over? Why carve you up, boil you, dismember you, shave you into strips, rupture you, and beat you to a bland pulp? How did you go from a wrinkled clay-coated seed to a monstrous corpse, bled of all worth, subsumed into a greater mass of vegetal waste, a product of duplication rather than reproduction? What is so special about that other part of you, the part we siphon off, crystallize, and purify for profit?

It's sugar that we want. We want the soft and supple sweetness. We want those tiny dissolvable bodies. We want enough of it to rot our teeth away. We want every cell to bloat with energy, we want all the dopamine released at once. And, yes, of course, such a fierce want will cause suffering. If the price paid to indulge this hunger seems high, that's only because you haven't yet accepted the impossibility of overcoming it. There is no overcoming it. It's lust: innate, insatiable, as deep and earthen as a grave.

Excerpted from Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield. Copyright © 2025 by Margie Sarsfield. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.