Beet Toast: The Avocado Toast We Deserve

Avocado toast is a thing of the past. Welcome to beet toast: the only breakfast toast you’ll need for at least two years.

Breakfast is the most healing of all the meals; it sets the tone for your day. I recently heard the phrase “you are what you eat” for the very first time and have been meditating on it deeply for weeks. You are. What. You eat. If you are what you eat then you eat what you are. We eat the food we deserve. Which brought me to the question: what breakfast am I? What dayspring diet defines my dosha?

Will I start my day as a poached egg? Am I six loose almonds? Which protein defines me as a person? Probably human meat if we’re being 100% honest. But my people tell me that it’s illegal in the States so I’ll have to save that experiment until I’m back in my true home: the country of International Waters.

One would have to be a bloody cube to deny the visceral aesthetic appeal of avocado toast. Green. On Toast. Perfection. The vegetable equivalent of an Instagram post of a terracotta succulent planter. That’s not who I am. If anything, I’m a carved raw citrine succulent planter. Which brings me to my most recent revelation. Bloody cubes. Beets, to be specific. Beets are the vegetable genus’ answer to raw human flesh. I’m not a graceful and Brancusi-esque avocado. I am a beet.

Consider the Beet

If he were still alive, David Foster Wallace would ask us — no, he would command us to “consider the avocado.” The persea americana. The “crocodile pear.” It is high maintenance to cultivate and only good for like, a day. Avocado’s pale green and clean silhouette is as zeitgeist-y as it gets. But what happens when it’s 2020 and we’re still eating the 2018 equivalent of a bacon milkshake? As of-the-moment as I am, I am also timeless. I require a breakfast toast topping that reflects that. I deserve it and so do you. So I would implore you, practically begging with nothing but dirty red roots in my hands: consider the beet.

These are dark times, and bloody. People are dying and even worse, descending into poverty because of their addiction to avocado toast. But times have always been like this. The only constant in life is misery and death. Whether you’re dying of dysentery in the slums of Mumbai or staring out the window of your parkside pied-de-terre and FEELING NOTHING, misery is the one thing that makes us all exactly the same. When I’m miserable I want to chew on an apple that comes from the dirt and tastes like a diabetic’s blood.

There are lessons to be learned from the beet as well. Avocados mature on the tree then ripen on the ground. No one should be forced to go to a second location to become their best self. Beets can live out their entire lives underground. I could probably do that too if someone were paying me enough to write about the experience.

Beet Toast for Health and Vitality

Beets look like upside down, red poop emojis and their cleansing properties cannot be denied. The day after I eat beet toast, I want to go to the bathroom and not only feel cleansed but see the actual toxins leaving my body. I crave the feeling of my heart sinking to my stomach where I wonder to myself: is this how I die? On the toilet like Elvis? Once that panic passes, I have never felt more alive.

The following recipe came to me after an intense floating session in which I discovered I had not one but three open cuts on my body.

Beet Toast

• Artisan crust fig-walnut no knead bread, fresh out of the oven
• Farm churned Montbéliarde butter
• Black hawaiian sea salt
• Burmese pink pepper
• 3 Tablespoons reishi Sex Dust
• 1 or 3 beets.