Beets are fun! But not for eating. We loved when the dining hall served beets. See, we worked in the dishroom, and there was this huge trough of running water to rinse the food off into before putting them in the dish machine. If you take a couple fistfuls of beets and squeeze them into the water, it looks like a murder took place in the water trough:D Yes, we were that bored.
The real question is this:
When there’s a SDMB thread that says “why does X hate Y?”, why will the entire thread be full of responses quite to the contrary that do not answer the question?
FISH
Well, ignorance must be dispelled, yes?
I personally dislike beets because I find them insipidly sweet. This may sound odd coming from a mango-holic, but hey, there’s no accounting for taste 
I agree, but I’m not sure that disliking beets qualifies as ignorance. It’s also not clear that the statement “many Americans hate beets” is ignorance either.
Surely the OP was a generalization but not all-encompassing (“why do so many Americans hate beets”, not “why do all Americans,” or “why do Americans”); equally clear is that the responses are contrary, anecdotal, and unenlightening.
I was hoping to hear something about–prepare for a wild guess–beets being used for things like dye, or for their natural sugars as additives, or beet juice used to fill out, I don’t know, grape juice. Or something. If, as many people say here, beets taste better when prepared properly and not as canned mush, then I hoped for an explanation why we are always presented with canned mush and what happened to the part of the beet that tastes good? Instead, anecdotes about how yummy they are.
Sorry, but I’m still waiting for something informative. 
FISH
Here’s one American who likes beets, Eva Luna. In fact, I plant them in my garden every year. I love pickled beets and I make borscht every year. The best borscht I ever made was carnivore borscht.
Today, I used beet leaves in a salad along with collard greens, onions, broccoli, a bell pepper, a Hungarian hot wax banana pepper, sliced eggs, and Gorgonzola cheese. All vegetables came from my garden.
The squeamishness of many Americans to try new foods puzzles me, especially considering the popularity of hot dogs. The way I look at it, if you’re willing to eat a hot dog, you should be willing to try anything once. God only knows what they put in hot dogs; hell, Jimmy Hoffa could be in a dog!
FISH, this is the IMHO forum and the responses are the kind you’d expect here :).
Half Slav and I love beetroot. Not so keen on the beetroot out of a can but I’ll eat it rarely.
Green Bean, in NZ a traditional NZ hamburger will have a meat patty, tomato, tomato sauce, lettuce and a slice of beetroot. Salad rolls and salad sandwiches will often have a slice of beetroot in them too. I don’t think it’s as common over here in Australia though. In NZ it used to be that you could only buy tinned beetroot and never the fresh stuff unless you grew it. In which case, inevitably, you pickled it.
When I was growing up, we often had pickled beets and I loved them. I’ve never had borscht, but I’ve always wanted to try it.
My wife hates beets, but I can understand why. When she lived in a foster home as a kid, one of her foster mother’s kids who was passing out the food loaded her plate with pickled beets. Her foster mother made her sit at the table, long after everyone else was finished, until she finished her beets.
I discovered I do like beets, at least in borscht. To me it tasted like a slightly tangier, purple potato. I haven’t quite worked up the nerve to serve beets by themselves, but I’m working on it.
To answer your question, Fish. Most Americans probably do not like beets because of their color. They have most likely also been fed over cooked beets when they’ve had them. Beets and other root vegetables have long been associated with hard times and poverty. Rutabagas, parsnips and turnips all seem to suffer from this perception. The French regarded the newly introduced potato as only being fit for animal feed many decades after its arrival.
Because of this thread, I went out and bought beets and dill last night. I’m thawing some beef right now in preparation for a batch of delicious borsch soup. I’m going to experiment with using whole baby white creamer potatoes in this batch. I’m also going to try browning the beef quite a bit to intensify the flavor. If any of you have never tried borsch with some sour cream, please do so. For those of you who have tried sour cream, please consider using authentic Middle East Lebni yoghurt. You will never be able to eat regular yoghurt again. For those of you who like pickled beets, be sure to try them on a liverwurst sandwich. The flavors combine wonderfully.
When I make this soup, my secret is to toss a beef marrow bone into the pot. It adds a rich silky texture to the broth and deepens the flavor as well. Most Americans probably say they do not like beets because they have never tried borsch. A big steaming hot bowl of borsch with a dollop of sour cream floating in it should be accompanied by a slab of warm, freshly baked dark rye bread slathered with unsalted creamery butter. This is nectar of the gods. Nothing can rival a bowl of this sanguine ambrosia when it comes to chasing even the deepest of winter from your body and soul.
Remember, grating beets is like rough sex,
it’s hard to tell when you’ve hurt yourself.[ul][sup]ZENSTER’S SECOND LAW OF COOKING[/sup][/ul]
I’ve posted this recipe before, and honestly, I don’t know why I have always loved it. It has (apparently) two ingredients that would send most kids and a fair number of adults screaming from the table. But I grew up on the stuff, and I love it.
If you like beets and marinated herring, I heartily recommend punajuurisalaatti.
Boiled, peeled and diced potatoes, beets, and carrots (in a 3:2:1 ratio)
Diced apples (a couple should do - this was optional for us)
1 small onion, diced
a couple medium dill pickles, grated
chopped marinated herring, perhaps 1/3 cup (dependent on how much you love herring)
white pepper to taste
your favorite salad dressing (we use a mayo, sugar, vinegar, mustard sauce).
Mix together and chill. If serving to an unsuspecting crowd, make a small sign indicating that the resulting pretty pink concoction is not a sweet dessert. A Mr. Yuck face with BEETS! HERRING!! should fend off most, ensuring more yummy goodness for yourself. Enjoy!
That reminds me a bit of a terrifying thing the aforementioned lovely Irina tried to feed me once. The Russian name for it escapes me at the moment, but it is a layered salad:
1 layer diced beets in mayonnaise
1 layer chopped pickled herring in mayonnaise
1 layer chopped pickles in mayonnaise
Lather, rinse, repeat
Now I like all those items individually (the mayonnaise in small doses, though), but all together? It’s the only thing she ever cooked that I absolutely refused to eat. Other than that, Irochka was a wonder of Soviet cookery…which is no small feat. In the U.S., one might think “hmmm, I wonder what I want to eat for dinner?,” decide, and then wander off to the grocery store to purchase the ingredients. In the USSR, it was more like one wandered off to six or seven stores, stood in a dozen or so lines (there was a goofy system where you had to wait in one line to pay for an item, then take the receipt up to the counter and wait in another line for the item to be measured, if there was even any left by the time you got to the head of the line…and frequently there were separate lines for each semi-interesting item, plus limited quantities allowed per customer), then wait in one catchall line for any items that didn’t have their own individual lines…and by the time you got home, you had to try to figure out what the hell you could cook using the random items you had managed to secure that day. Ever tried to make dinner out of kefir, weevil-infested buckwheat, cabbage, and vinegar?
We had borscht every Christmas Eve as part of Wigilia (traditional Polish Christmas custom), and I hated it. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that most borscht doesn’t already have the sour cream added, an looks ike a clear red liquid – my grandmother’s was a pastel opaque pink, with gross-looking mushrooms in it.
ahem
I’m sure you meant weevil-enhanced buckwheat, no? A very useful protein ( and who knows, maybe flavor ) boost :p.
So let me guess - pancakes made from weevil-buckwheat flour and kefir ( just like buttermilk! 
) w/cabbage boiled in vinegar on the side. Sounds…errm…yummy? Or something.
- Tamerlane
I love beets, so long as they’re not pickled. They’re one of the best vegetables as far as I’m concerned, second only to asparagus and peas cooked with little onions. And I was born and raised in Illinois. Though my mom is Canadian. . .
The only problem with beets is that they bleed onto all of the other foods. One time, the juice mixed with my macaroni and cheese. It was a rather pretty sight, until you realized that you were looking at food and not fingerpaint.
BTW, Zenster, your suggestion of borsch and buttered rye bread sounds exceedingly good right now.
I have three words that no lover of good eating should every have to speak in the same sentence: Soviet dorm food.
As terrifying as some of our late glasnost-era conconctions were, at least it wasn’t the cafeteria of Leningrad State University. Any non-Soviet who ate there averaged food poisoning at least once a week (I’m not sure whether the Soviets were immune, or whether they washed down the cafeteria food with enough vodka to kill any stray bacteria or parasites). We finally threw away the money we’d paid in advance for their services for the semester and decided to try our luck with the sparse local markets.
(Come to think of it, LGU was named after Lomonosov; maybe they were just trying to honor his memory by conducting biological experiments.)
My father hates beets. I mean he really hates beets. If I ever asked him a food he didn’t like - that was it. And when I was growing up living just with him, he obviously never had them in the house. And as kid who didn’t love vegetables too much, I never bothered to try them. But this was in San Francisco.
Fast forward a number of years to Israel. We lived on a kibbutz, where they had beet salad almost every day. Our babies tended to love eating it (making a fantastic mess in the process.) But there was always other good food there, so why bother trying beets?
Now in the past few years I’ve tried to get past some of my previous biases regarding vegetables I didn’t like as a kid. Foods that made me gag before - onions, peppers, radishes, and others - I now enjoy. But I never made beets at home, they weren’t part of any recipes, and aren’t obviously easy to make on their own with no recipe.
But now I work in this office with a cafeteria, and together with your entree, you get a salad. And one time I say what the hell, I’ll try the beets. And they were great! They were almost as filling as an equal amount of potatoes, with a similar consistency, but sweet. As a matter of fact, I’ve cut back on them a bit, because they are a bit hi-cal.
I mentioned this to my father, and he was shocked. “How can you eat beets???” But the truth is that he’s now very much aware that a parents preferences can really influence a child’s likes and dislikes.
I’m not sure of how they prepare the beets here, but it seems like Israeli beet salad is a pretty standard thing. I can try asking the cafeteria people tomorrow, I suppose…
I gag on cooked beets. The flavor is <ahem> one of a kind.
I will however eat pickled beets but only on rare occasion.
It doesn’t matter what kind of beets you give me cooked I just gag. I can’t eat cooked spinach either.
Even at McDonalds. Scrape the egg off that burger and there’s a whole hidden layer of beets. Freaked me out real bad.
An Australian hamburger “with the lot” will have beet(root) on it. If you ask for a salad sandwich, you’ll get beets too. Wonderful stuff.
Now the American habit of putting dill pickles on burgers, on the other hand…