It's Probably Not What You Think

August 27, 2020

We humans have a tendency to assume the worst, especially at first. This is probably built deep into the gene pools of us mothers, and I'm sure our instinct to worry about our kids and project a worst-case scenario during times of uncertainty has helped our species survive.

But situations are complex, especially as we're no longer living in a hunter-gatherer society. Although the human brain copes by grasping for simple explanations, we can't possibly know everything about why things happen the way they do. So one truth has served me particularly well as my own parenting has evolved over the years:

It's probably not what you think.

Here's an example: COVID has helped me appreciate abundance, and so I'm feeling an especially fervent love for this year's harvest season. During my experiments with new veggie dishes, I tripped over an important fact that I've never heard a chef or farmer mention, but which everyone should know. So I hereby present it as this week's official KidsOutAndAbout Public Service Announcement:

Eating beets can turn your urine pink.

Now, bright-pink urine ranks pretty high up in reasons to envision a worst-case scenario, right? I had five or six tough hours one day last week, with neither Google nor WebMD reassuring me; all of their answers were pretty dire. But suddenly I remembered the previous day's salad, and realized I might have been Googling the wrong thing. I seized my phone. Can beets turn urine pink? I asked Siri. Answer: Yes.

See? Living in a jungle of information where what we hunt are answers and what we gather are facts, we might not stumble upon the right answer right away. It's really easy to get trapped by our imaginations, so it's important to remember that the bright-pink worst case answer always deserves further fact-gathering before we freak out. Because it's likely just the beets.

—Debra Ross, publisher
 

P.S. After I submitted this publisher's column for review, our Director of Communications, Katie Beltramo, pointed out that this sinister side-effect of beets appears in her KidsOutAndabout article Vegetables A to Z: How to prepare vegetables so your kids will want to eat them. And apparently beets are not the only vegetable with pee-altering superpowers. Now I know.