Susan Young - Growing Beans: A Diet for Healthy People and Planet

T he family of pulses includes peas, lentils and beans, but it is beans, or more precisely beans eaten at the shelling stage or dried to eat later, that this book is all about. Although the word bean is applied loosely to everything from broad beans to soya, I focus on the family of beans ( Phaseolus ) that includes all those that we might also call haricot, kidney, navy, flageolet and the big fat beans that runner bean plants produce.

Fixing food has never been more important. In 2020-21, the year of the pandemic, an important global platform calling for food system transformation named EAT stated that shifting diets could unlock climate, health, environmental benefits and reduce the risk of future pandemics. Replacing overconsumption of meat by eating more vegetables, grains, nuts and pulses is key to changing our diets. Beans have a crucial role to play in replacing animal proteins that are costly to produce and are a drain on the earths resources. As gardeners, we can grow them, and lots of them.

Vegetable growing traditions among gardeners are led by what we like to eat. Or perhaps it is better to say that there is a process of co-evolution between growing and cooking traditions. Eating habits in Britain dont currently include a lot of beans, well, except for the tinned Beanz variety of course. Meat and two veg potatoes and the usual range of root and leaf vegetables have remained the staples of vegetable eating. These staples have dictated what commercial seed sellers offer and what gardeners tend to grow. Pulses are grown as peas and broad beans, but bean growing is typically limited to producing beans to eat at the green stage and not at the shelling or dried stage. Dried beans have long been seen as only good for throwing into stews or soups where everything but the bean adds the flavour. Usually these beans are the staple varieties, a red kidney bean or plain haricot, bought ready-packaged, dry, hard and ordinary. But beans are finally, gradually being recognised and celebrated in their own right, for their individual, delicious flavours, textures and appearance. They are delectable on their own, with only the lightest of flavourings, or can be the main ingredient in the most wonderful range of endlessly variable dishes.

Although our British cuisine has not evolved over the years to include beans, luckily we dont have to look far from home to find food cultures and growing traditions from which we can learn. Across Europe from Sweden to Greece, Portugal to Bulgaria, bean cultivation has flourished in the hands of gardeners and small-scale farmers who have grown them for their own consumption or to sell locally. Cooking traditions based on locally grown beans have evolved with far greater versatility and variety than our British cooking habits. At the same time, Britain is home to a wide diversity of communities who have brought with them culinary traditions from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean that include delicious pulse dishes.