Ericca J. Stern - Vegans Bean Meat : A Complete Nutritional Guide to Beans & Lentils (Legumes) With Sprouting and Delicious Recipe

What sets beans apart from other food crops? Structurally, they have pods with seeds inside them. Apart from beans, they also include peas, lentils and peanuts are even added to this category in some quarters. Beans are often classified as legumes, even though a less expansive view reserves the word for leguminous crops harvested for their dry grain. The term bean typically excludes legumes with tiny seeds which exclusively serve forage purposes, hay and silage purposes such as clover and alfalfa.

After contact between Europe and the Americas in the Colombian era, the term beans was extended to include pod-borne seeds such as the common bean, the runner bean, and the related genus Vigna. It is also common to have the term being applied to many other seeds of similar form, including the Old World favorites such as soybeans, peas, chickpeas, vetches, and lupins. Those with even less resemblance or association such as coffee beans, vanilla beans, castor beans and cocoa beans are also referred to by the same term because of their similar form. This explains why the term bean is loosely used to make reference to a whole lot of different species.

In the same manner as the early grains, legumes make up one of the first crops ever cultivated, dating as far back as the Bronze Age. Both archaeologists and Paleontologists alike have discovered beans in the tombs of the Pharaohs and Aztecs. They were revered as an emblem of life in ancient Egypt - even having entire temples dedicated to them. The Greeks and the Romans were not left out too as it was used in festivals to worship gods. Throw that in with the fact that the four most prominent families of the Roman era get their names from beans species - Fabiu s (Fava bean), Lentulus (lentils), Piso (pea) and Cicero (chickpea) - and you will understand just how far this crop comes.

Early discoveries point to the fact that Indians, who are known to have spread across the Americas, cultivated and consumed numerous kinds of beans. From the earliest of times, beans were traded back and forth, planted and consumed, as explorers wandered the earth. During the Middle Ages, beans formed one of the primary foods of the peasants of Europe.

A return from memory lane and to more recent times show that beans also came in handy for sailors due to its ease of storage and availability - this should come to mind whenever you think about how Navy bean got its name. The food has fed great armies of the world from the most primitive of times to the battles of the recent past. From a period that came to be known as the Great Depression right up to todays world, beans have remained steadfast in its offering of a tasty appeal and high nutritional value. A single cup of cooked beans supplies an astonishing 25% of the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for amino acids at a cost lesser than the requirement for meat production. Such figures as this are what makes beans indispensable as a staple in todays pantries. This work seeks to address the apparent dearth of information resources and limited literature on the subject of the seed crop; beans, as well as its undisputed importance since the beginning of time, its relatively superior nutritional advantages and some of its exquisite, tasty and mouth-watering recipes.

Beans are one of the longest cultivated plants. Broad beans, also called Fava beans, in their wild state the size of a small fingernail, were gathered in Afghanistan and the Himalayan foothills.