Watching the snowplow charge up my Sullivan County road, pushing aside the remnants from yet another winter storm, I couldn’t help but think about borscht.

Not to eat. To spread on the road.

It seems that borscht, that eastern European soup favorite that for decades filled the stomachs and satisfied the pallets of guests vacationing in the Catskill resorts – thus the common moniker, the Borscht Belt – is now filling the need of municipalities in the Midwest looking for a cheaper way to clear their roads in winter.

Yeah, borscht.

A cultural and culinary cuisine and the perfect de-icer. Who knew?

You might be thinking that after all the years of sharing how he served borscht in dining rooms from the Shady Nook in Loch Sheldrake to the Stevensville in Swan Lake, and now as a board member of the Borscht Belt Museum in Ellenville, Barry’s finally got borscht on the brain.

Maybe.

And maybe if I could have managed to spill some borscht on the road instead of my white shirts, I could have saved myself some change at the laundromat and the county a few bucks on snow removal.

A bit far-fetched, you say?

Not to the fine folks in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, who are using their brains and some brine when it comes to making the most out of borscht. Only they call it beet juice.

Whatya’ expect?

We’re talking 20 minutes north of Milwaukee – not Monticello.

Borscht. Beet juice.

Whatever you want to call it, since 2009 the officials in this rural community, with a population of just over 6,000, once known as home to Wisconsin’s last covered bridge, replaced the calcium chloride with an organic liquid additive made up from sugar beets. It seems the beet juice derivative accelerates and enhances the salt’s effectiveness.

Put simply, less salt is needed to do the same work. The beet juice mix begins to de-ice quicker, works better in colder temperatures, and is friendlier to the environment. And the town figures to save as much as 12 percent on salting costs.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, beet juice has helped reduce the annual average usage of salt by 20 percent, explained Tim Byrne, maintenance operations and fleet services manager for Lincoln Transportation and Utilities.

“Sugar is sticky, especially when it’s wet,” Byrne told weather.com in an interview. “So, that stickiness, as it’s mixed in with the rock salt coming out the tail spinner of the truck, helps reduce what we call ‘bounce and scatter.’”

That means less salt needs to be used and more of it stays on the roadway, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the process, Byrne said.

He adds that the organic by-product serves as a “natural corrosion inhibitor” that “makes a brine 75 percent less corrosive than salt itself.” That helps protect city infrastructure like bridges, as well as any vehicle on the city’s 2,600 miles of driving lanes.

I can’t shake the irony of a place known as the borscht belt using borscht (or beet juice if you’re in Wisconsin) to ease some of the financial and environmental burdens of also being in the snow belt.

Imagine if all those Catskill hotel owners knew they could double or triple their profits with every batch of borscht they made. Use it to entice guests and then sell the leftovers to area highway departments.

Who knows?

Given the love of borscht, the cost of salt, and the winters we have, it just might have been enough to save a few old resorts. Then we could have called ourselves the “Borscht Belt-way.”

Something to think about as the snow plow makes yet another pass.

Barry Lewis is a longtime journalist and author who lives with his wife Bonnie in the Town of Neversink. He can be reached at      barrylewisscdemocrat@gmail.com.