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Life of crime began with a show-and-tell sugar beet

Joyce Walter writes about an incident from her past
ReflectiveMoments_JoyceWalter
Reflective Moments by Joyce Walter

The headlines in the rural newspaper caught my attention: “Large sugar beet pile rots in Southern Alberta.”

Immediately the childhood lessons came to mind —  lessons that came from parents who survived the Dirty Thirties, wartime rationing and other food shortages. I could hear them in my memory telling me not to waste food, to clean up my plate, and shaming me for wastefulness by telling me that starving children would love to have my wasted food.

Of course I paid little attention at the time, but now decades later, those educational lectures remain with me, hence the leftovers in the refrigerator, and the dismay I feel when hearing about foodstuffs being thrown out, or in this case, allowed to rot in the storage field.

I felt similar concern when dairy farmers had to dump extra milk, when vegetables and fruit could not be harvested because of lack of labour, thus going to waste when hundreds go hungry and would have enjoyed an apple or orange or even a chunk of lettuce.

And so, I read with interest, the sugar beet story, learning it is not that unusual for some rot to attack stored sugar beets before they can be processed. In this case the damage was more extensive because of extreme cold weather in the area with about 16,000 tonnes affected.

This story resurrected a guilty conscience, the result of an indiscretion back in my school-going days, when show-and-tell Fridays were a competition between students vying for the most unusual exhibits.

If I recall correctly, the parents with this elementary school student in the back seat, were travelling in the Taber area, enroute to visit relatives in Lethbridge. We were intrigued by the large piles of “something” beside the highway. I wondered out loud and was told the piles were sugar beets. There was an ‘a-ha’ moment and then the demand to have one of those beets for my next show-and-tell.

The parent was most obliging, stopped the car and went down into the ditch to obtain a sugar beet for his daughter’s school project. Thus my life of crime was aided and abetted by an adult who likely should have been lecturing me about right and wrong that theft could result in a jail term, regardless of the educational integrity of the act.

I never thought for one minute we had done anything wrong, this particular beet coming straight out of the ditch and not from behind the fencing that protected the hundreds of other beets. Public domain would have possibly been a reliable defence, but then the ditch belonged to the Alberta government, or at least to the Municipal District of Taber. So perhaps there might be a jail term!

That beet was successfully taken across the Alberta border into Saskatchewan and went with me to school on the appropriate day. It was a hit at show-and-tell with fellow students and even the teacher being impressed with such an unusual exhibit.

I do hope there’s a statute of limitations on sugar beet indiscretions. “Your Honour, sugar isn’t healthy for you and I was simply removing a health hazard for my community,” I could plead. Perhaps I should have my favourite legal aid lawyer on speed dial just in case.

Joyce Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.  

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