Eat the Beets

Or stay stuck with who you used to be.

At a formal dinner, a man in a tuxedo pushed his plate away as if it had offended him personally.

“I hate beets,” he said.

The dish didn’t look offensive. Quite the opposite. It was beautifully constructed — roasted golden and red beets layered into a tight tower, formed and stacked with real intention, rising from a bed of arugula, topped with goat cheese and finished with walnuts for texture and crunch. It was plated artwork — the kind of dish that makes you reach for your camera.

“What is this?” Trevor had asked just moments before, poking at it with his fork.

“Roasted beet tartare,” I told him.

“Beets?” His voice lifted just enough to turn heads at the table. “I hate them.” And with that, he slid the plate toward the center, dropped his fork back into its place, and was done.

I’ve never been much for arguments. I enjoy a good debate, but once someone decides they already know something — once belief calcifies into certainty — facts tend to bounce right off. Still, I asked the obvious question.

“When’s the last time you had beets?”

He paused, thought about it, then shrugged. “Probably when I was a kid.”

Fifteen years earlier, give or take.

I took a bite from my own plate. Bright, earthy, slightly sweet — balanced by the tang of the goat cheese and the crunch of the walnuts. Nothing like the canned, overcooked version most of us grew up avoiding. I told him so. He offered me his plate. I told him to try it. He refused. I kept suggesting. He kept declining. And the more he resisted, the more it became clear this had very little to do with taste—the more I wanted to push him.

Eventually, after enough gentle persistence, he gave in.

“Fine. One bite.”

He took a small forkful, closed his eyes, and chewed slowly. Then he reached for a larger one.

“Wow. These are actually really good.”

He finished the plate.

Not the one he refused. But close enough.

That moment has stayed with me — not because Trevor changed his mind about beets, but because of how long, and how completely, he had been certain that he didn’t like them. Fifteen years of avoidance built on a childhood impression. A verdict delivered by a ten-year-old, carried into adulthood without ever being questioned.

We do this all the time. Not just with food, but with music, places, people, and ideas. We decide early, often casually, and carry that decision forward as if it were permanent. But it isn’t fact. It’s memory.

We confuse memory with truth. Just because you didn’t like something once doesn’t mean you don’t like it now.

I know this not because I’m particularly wise, but because I’ve been Trevor. More than once.

I was twenty-two, living in Newport Beach, when a woman from Colorado started showing up on weekends to spend time with her college friends. She had auburn hair, fair skin, a few freckles, and I was completely smitten. I asked her out. When she suggested dinner at a Thai restaurant in Venice Beach, I said yes without hesitation — which was its own kind of lie. Every instinct I had said no. I was a finicky eater, the kind who scanned menus for the one familiar thing and ordered that, every time. I bit my tongue and drove up the coast anyway, because she had asked and I wanted to impress her.

She ordered for us. The food arrived — fragrant, colorful, completely outside anything I had grown up eating. I hesitated, then took a bite, because what else was I going to do?

Everything shifted.

The flavors were alive in a way nothing I had eaten before was. Sweet, spicy, bright, balanced. I remember sitting there thinking: how have I never done this before? The answer was simple. I had already decided I wouldn’t like it. The decision had been made years earlier by a younger, more cautious, far less curious version of me.

The verdict came before the evidence.

In this case, it took a woman to open my mind — and my palate.

Over time, I’ve noticed that we tend to meet new experiences in one of three ways.

We reject them — outright, before we’ve given them a chance, because they don’t fit the map we’ve already drawn.

We resist them — clinging to what’s familiar until someone or something pushes us just far enough to try.

We receive them — openly, without friction, letting the experience tell us what to think of it afterward.

Most of us live in the first two. Trevor needed a push. At twenty-two, I needed a nudge — and, if I’m honest, the right motivation. But a few months ago I watched someone do something rarer.

I had an extra ticket to a small, intimate show at my favorite local live music venue. Acoustic. Seated. No spectacle. Just a guitar and a man on stage — Jorma Kaukonen, eighty-five years old, still playing with the same quiet intensity that made him who he is. Not exactly a household name anymore, unless you know.

I floated the ticket around. Sent a few texts. Mentioned it in passing. The responses came quickly, and predictably. “Never heard of him.” “Not really my thing.” “I’ll pass.”

Doors closing before they were ever opened.

Then I mentioned it to one more person.

“Want to go?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. No hesitation. No questions about genre, era, or whether he’d recognize a single song.

He just showed up.

For the next couple of hours, he sat there leaning forward, listening, taking it all in without trying to place it or compare it to anything he already knew. No filter. No resistance. Only curiosity.

After the show, we stepped outside into the cool night air, and he turned to me and said, simply, “That was incredible.”

That was Kenny. He skis, plays pickleball, says yes to things.

No conversion required. No fifteen-year gap between belief and reality. Just openness — which turns out to be both the simplest and the rarest posture of all.

Jorma Kaukonen, 85, still pulling it out of the air — Belly Up Tavern, February 2026.

Not long ago, I traveled with my mother through the Black Hills of South Dakota. She’s eighty-nine, sharp as ever, and over the course of that trip we found ourselves laughing about the kid I used to be at her dinner table. Meals were a negotiation. Sometimes a standoff. There were nights she cooked something entirely separate for me because I had already decided I didn’t want what everyone else was having — not because I’d tried it, but because I’d looked at it and concluded I wouldn’t like it.

She remembered. I remembered. We laughed — the way you can laugh at things once enough distance has accumulated.

Now I’ll eat almost anything. I’ve eaten things on the road — in markets and roadside stalls and homes I was welcomed into across five continents — that I would never have touched at twenty-two. And every single time, my world got a little bigger.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped deciding in advance what I wouldn’t like. That shift, quiet as it was, changed everything.

This isn’t really about beets. Or Thai food. Or Jorma Kaukonen. It’s about the quiet, invisible ways we limit ourselves without realizing it — the outdated conclusions we carry forward, the childhood verdicts we never think to revisit.

Most people don’t lack motivation. They lack interruption.

They need something — a dinner invitation, a spare concert ticket, a woman with auburn hair suggesting somewhere new — to break the momentum of what they’ve already decided is true. We confuse familiarity with safety. We confuse memory with truth. And the real problem isn’t that we’re closed-minded. It’s that we don’t realize how long we’ve been closed.

Sometimes it takes someone to nudge us — even push us. Sometimes curiosity pulls us forward on its own. And sometimes, if we’re willing, all it takes is a simple decision to say yes.

So the next time something unfamiliar shows up — on your plate, in your headphones, or somewhere out there in the world — pause before you push it away.

Take the bite.

You might be right that you won’t like it. But you might be wrong. And in that small space between the two, something new begins.

Somewhere in the Black Hills, laughing about the kid I used to be.