What beans mean

A bean is not just a bean. Why, what do I mean?

Well, besides sounding like a certain children’s author just then, it’s this: Beans just might carry the weight of the world on their (nonexistent) shoulders.

I know I preach about this semi-regularly, or maybe just plain regularly. Ever since I decided that beans were an important enough subject to deserve a new cookbook devoted to a modern — dare I say “cool”? — approach, and then wrote said book, and then watched it become a bestseller, I’ve known that if I were ever asked to give a lecture, that would be my topic.

I’ve enjoyed talking about any number of things: plant-based cooking, food writing and editing, surviving the journalism apocalypse. (My strategy: Retire!) But when Rancho La Puerta, the iconic spa in Tecate, Mexico, asked me to add a 45-minute presentation to my teaching duties on my annual visit there, the choice was clear: I’d deliver a lovely little legume lesson.

Table of Contents

• My next Zoom cooking class: BLACK BEANS!

• I break for animals: Duke

• Recipe: Pinto Bean Tortilla Salad

• More favorite bean-salad recipes

In fact, I’m writing you now from The Ranch, on the morning of the day I’m on the schedule to give my talk. I figured you readers might appreciate it perhaps even more than anyone else, so I’m sharing it with you today, at the tail end of this newsletter so you TL;DR people don’t have to scroll through all those paragraphs to get to the Zoom class info or the cute dog or, of course, THE RECIPE! (“Just get to the recipe!”)

Even so, I apologize if the read is just too too long. The written version of a speech of any considerable length always looks intimidating, even though if you heard me say it all out loud, well, I hope it would be at least entertaining. Big ole caveat: Who knows how much I’ll veer from the script when I’m actually in front of an audience?

Probably a lot.

My next Zoom cooking class: Black beans!

When I asked the students at my most recent Zoom cooking class, devoted to lentils, what they wanted next, the consensus was articulated by one of them: “You can never have too many beans.” Well, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

So on Sunday, May 3, from noon to 2 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be doing what I did with pinto beans a couple months back, and learning three recipes to make with a single pot of black beans — along with all my tips on how to make them taste their best (hint: no soaking!).

As always, you get 25 percent off a ticket to the class as a subscriber to this newsletter; just use the promo code “eatatjoes”! And don’t worry; if you just want to watch and not cook along, you’re welcome to do that. And if you can’t make it live but want to watch later, your ticket gets you access to a recording.

I break for animals:
Duke

Recipe: Pinto Bean Tortilla Salad

This is my updated version of my mother’s “Texas Salad,” which she made for special occasions when I was growing up in West Texas. The vinaigrette can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week. To save time, feel free to use your favorite store-bought tortilla chips instead of frying your own. After they are fried, the tortillas can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.

6 servings

For the vinaigrette:

• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

• ¼ cup canola oil

• ¼ cup red wine vinegar

• 1 garlic clove, coarsely chopped

• 1 teaspoon sugar

• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more as needed

For the salad:

• ½ cup peanut oil, for frying

• 6 (6-inch) corn tortillas

• 12 cups lightly packed, torn romaine lettuce leaves

• 3 cups cooked or canned no-salt-added pinto beans (from two 15-ounce cans), drained and rinsed

• 6 scallions, thinly sliced on the diagonal

• 1 cup vegan or dairy feta cheese, crumbled

• ¾ cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, sliced

To make the vinaigrette: Combine the cilantro, olive and canola oils, vinegar, garlic, sugar, and salt in a blender; puree until smooth. Taste and add more salt as needed.

To make the salad: Line a plate with paper towels.

Pour the peanut oil into a large skillet over medium heat. Once the oil starts to shimmer, add 2 or 3 tortillas (or as many as will comfortably fit); fry them on each side until crisp and golden brown, 1 to 2 minutes. Lift each tortilla with tongs and let the excess oil drip off, then transfer it to the paper-towel-lined plate. Working in batches, repeat with the remaining tortillas. Let the tortillas cool, then break them into bite-size pieces.

Toss the tortilla pieces with the lettuce, beans, scallions, feta, tomatoes, and ½ cup of the vinaigrette in a large serving bowl. Add the remaining ¼ cup of the vinaigrette, if desired, or reserve for another use. Serve immediately.

Adapted from “Cool Beans” (Ten Speed Press, 2020), copyright Joe Yonan.

More favorite bean salad recipes

These are gift links to the recipes at the Post. Note that they require you to register but not subscribe. Gift links are free to access for 2 weeks, so if you want to come back to any of these recipes but don’t subscribe or want to subscribe, I suggest you find a way to save them!

Warm White Bean and Bread Salad

Kimchi and Kale Dense Bean Salad

Rice Salad With Beans and Greens

Eat more beans

Okay. I need to tell you something. And I need you to trust me when I say this is going somewhere good.

When my husband Carl and I went on our honeymoon to Mexico City, we sat down at a beautiful restaurant called Maximo Bistrot — one of the best in the city, the kind of place with a tasting menu and a wine list that requires a flashlight — and when the waiter came over to ask what we were there for, we looked at each other, we looked at him, and I said:

"We're just here for the beans."

That’s right. We were honeymooning in one of the world's great food cities, surrounded by incredible options — and we ordered the beans. I had heard that Maximo Bistrot served the best beans in Mexico City. And I’m a bean person.

Now — I know what some of you are thinking. Beans? Like, the thing that was in my grandmother's casserole? The mushy stuff in the bottom of the Wendy's chili? The side dish nobody asked for at the cookout?

Yes. Those beans. Exactly those beans. And also — absolutely nothing like what you're imagining. Because what I'm here to tell you today is that beans are the most underrated, underutilized, criminally overlooked food in the American kitchen. And as a food journalist and cookbook author, I have spent years trying to fix that.

If you’re a bean person like me, you know the truth: Beans are not a side dish. They are not a peasant food (well — they are, but I mean that in the most flattering way possible). They are not a consolation prize for when you ran out of chicken. But what you might not know is that they are, in fact, the answer to a whole bunch of questions you didn't even know you were asking — questions about your health, about the planet, about feeding a world that is trying to figure out how to keep eating as things get increasingly complicated.

Today I'm going to make the case for beans. A full-throated, unembarrassed, mildly obsessive case for beans. I'm going to tell you why they're good for you, why they're good for the planet, why they might literally be a key to feeding the world, and then — because I'm a practical person and also a food editor — I'm going to tell you exactly how to start eating more of them.

And yes, I'm going to address the thing. We'll get there. You know the thing I mean.

Let's go.

Let me paint you a picture. Imagine five communities, scattered around the world. Sardinia, Italy. Okinawa, Japan. Nicoya, Costa Rica. Ikaria, Greece. Loma Linda, California. These are the places in the world where people live the longest — where reaching 100 is not a newsworthy event, where centenarians do things like tend gardens and walk uphill and continue to have opinions about politics.

A National Geographic researcher named Dan Buettner studied these communities for years and called them the Blue Zones. He was trying to figure out what they had in common. The answer, it turned out, was not a fancy supplement. It was not a biohacker gadget. It was not intermittent fasting or cold plunges or any of the things that will be selling ads to you on Instagram later today.

It was beans.

There are other common threads, but in every single Blue Zone, beans are a cornerstone of the daily diet. Not an occasional thing. Every. Single. Day. Half a cup to a full cup, sitting on every table, in every form — fava beans in Sardinia, black-eyed peas and chickpeas in Ikaria, black beans in Costa Rica, soybeans in Okinawa, pinto beans in Loma Linda. Buettner concluded that beans are, and I'm going to need you to really hear this, "the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world."

That's a sentence worth pausing on. Not A longevity diet. Every longevity diet.

And the research backs it up. A major seven-year study of older adults across four countries found that beans were the single strongest dietary predictor of survival. Not broccoli. Not salmon. Not any of the glamorous superfoods. Beans. The same study found that every 20-gram increase in daily legume intake — that's about an ounce, barely two tablespoons — was associated with a 7 to 8 percent lower risk of death from all causes.

Now. What IS it about beans? Why are they such overachievers?

First — they are, uniquely, both a protein AND a vegetable. This is genuinely unusual in the food world. They don't fit into a single box on your food pyramid, which is one reason I think they get treated as a sidekick. But a half-cup of cooked beans gives you protein comparable to an ounce of meat, along with complex carbohydrates, and a boatload of fiber. A full cup of beans provides about half your daily fiber recommendation. Half! In one cup of food that costs, what, all of 50 cents?

And fiber, people, is where things get really interesting. Most Americans get only about half of the fiber they need daily — and fiber is not just the thing that keeps your plumbing moving, though it absolutely does that too. Fiber feeds your gut microbiome, which is the colony of bacteria living in your intestines that basically runs your immune system. A healthy gut microbiome is linked to lower inflammation, better mood, better immune function, and yes — longer life.

The soluble fiber in beans also lowers LDL cholesterol, helps prevent Type 2 diabetes by stabilizing blood sugar, and a 2001 study found that eating beans just four times a week was associated with a 22 percent reduction in heart disease risk.

Then there's the vitamin situation. Beans are loaded with folate, iron, potassium, magnesium, zinc, B vitamins, and lysine — an essential amino acid that is rare in the plant world. And here's a pro tip from the research: pair your beans with whole grains — rice, quinoa, corn — and you get the same range of amino acids in the protein as you do with meat. Which is why the traditional dishes of many of the world's longest-lived cultures are exactly that combination. Costa Rica's national dish, gallo pinto? Black beans and rice. The Mediterranean staple of lentils with flatbread? Same idea. These cultures figured this out centuries ago, not because they had access to nutritional journals, but because it tasted good and kept them going.

Oh, and for those interested in weight management — a 2016 analysis found that people who ate up to nine ounces of beans a day for six weeks lost more weight than people who didn't. Not because beans are some magic weight-loss pill; we’re not talking about Ozem-bean. It’s because they are so deeply satisfying — their combination of protein, fiber, and slow-burning carbohydrates means you feel full for a long time. Studies have actually shown that meals based on beans leave people more satisfied than meals based on meat. I would say I find that shocking, except I know from so much personal experience just how true it is.

So to recap: beans are simultaneously a protein, a vegetable, a fiber delivery system, a heart medicine, a blood sugar regulator, a microbiome booster, a weight management tool, and possibly a ticket to your 100th birthday. All in a food that you can buy in a can for a couple dollars.

Tell me why we are not eating more of them. I'll wait.

Okay. So. The world is kind of on fire. Literally and metaphorically. Now, beans can’t save democracy or improve voter turnout for the midterms — not yet, at least. But when it comes to climate change, one of the biggest contributors is how we eat — specifically, how much meat we eat and how that meat gets produced.

About a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are linked to food production. A lot of that comes from livestock — from the land cleared to raise animals, from the methane released by cows as they digest their food, from the water and grain that goes into producing each pound of beef. In beef, just 5 percent of the original protein in the animal's feed survives to become protein on your plate. That is a staggeringly inefficient system. We are running an enormous, resource-devouring machine to produce something that a much simpler system could accomplish.

And that simpler system is beans.

Here's a statistic I think about a lot: Bean production results in 90 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than beef production, per 100 grams of protein. Ninety. Percent. Fewer. We are not talking about a marginal improvement. We are talking about a transformation of scale.

Beans also do something that almost no other food crop does: They fix nitrogen. This means bean plants actually pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and deposit it into the soil, fertilizing it naturally. They don't deplete the land; they improve it. Growing beans in rotation with other crops is standard agricultural practice specifically because it enriches the soil for whatever comes next. While livestock farming degrades land over time — and has already eaten up about 70 percent of all agricultural land globally — bean farming actively restores it.

Then there's water. For each gram of protein produced, the water footprint of beans is 17 percent that of beef. Not 17 percent less than beef. 17 percent OF beef. As in, you could produce six times as much bean protein with the same amount of water that it takes to produce beef protein.

And beans are shelf-stable. You dry them, you put them in a bag, they sit on your shelf for years. No refrigeration, no complex cold chain, minimal transportation emissions relative to their caloric density. For feeding people in a world facing increasingly unpredictable weather and supply chains, that stability matters enormously.

A coalition called "Beans is How" — a grammatically creative name, right? — has set a goal of doubling global bean consumption by 2028, specifically because they've identified beans as one of the most powerful tools we have for addressing climate, nutrition, and food security simultaneously. They call it a "triple win." I call it a bargain.

Here's the thing I want to be clear about: I'm not asking anyone to become vegan. I'm not asking you to give up your Thanksgiving turkey or your summer burgers. I am asking you to think about one very simple swap: Can you replace one or two of your weekly meat meals with a bean dish? Not a sad, reluctant replacement — a genuinely delicious, satisfying, actually-exciting bean dish.

Because if even a significant portion of the population made that shift, the environmental impact would be measurable. Researchers have found that substituting beef with beans in meal patterns would significantly reduce the environmental footprint worldwide. And you'd barely notice in terms of how full and happy you feel at the table.

The math here is really in our favor, people. Good for your body AND good for the planet is not usually how things work. Usually it's: this is good for you, therefore it tastes like sad wet cardboard. Beans broke the system. We should take advantage of that.

Now, here’s where I ask you to zoom out even further, because beans are not just a personal health choice or even just an environmental one. They may be a genuine piece of the global food security puzzle.

Here's the situation: we have about 8 billion people on the planet. That number is going up, and quickly. At the same time, cimate change is disrupting agricultural systems. Extreme weather is threatening crop yields. And a growing middle class in many developing countries is aspiring to eat the way wealthy Western countries have eaten for decades — which means more meat, which means more land, more water, more emissions, in a system that is already strained.

Beans offer an alternative pathway. They can be grown in a wide variety of climates and soil types, including marginal soils where other crops struggle. They are affordable to grow and to buy — in most places in the world, they are accessible to people who cannot afford meat at every meal. They are culturally embedded in the food traditions of most of the world's populations, from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to South and Southeast Asia. You don't have to convince most of the world to eat beans. They already do. The push needs to happen here, in the wealthy West, where we've largely abandoned them in favor of animal protein.

One of the things that moved me when I wrote my book “Cool Beans” was researching how central beans are to cuisines I hadn't fully appreciated. The bean traditions of Mexico, of Brazil, of Ethiopia, of India, of the American South — these are not backup-plan cooking. This is cooking of tremendous sophistication and meaning, food that tells you who a people are and where they came from. We have so much to learn from it.

The path to a world where 9 or maybe even 10 billion people can eat well without destroying the planet's systems runs through beans. That's not me being dramatic. That's an increasing consensus among food system researchers and climate scientists. Beans are not a complete solution, but they are a central part of one.

OK. I promised I would address the thing. And you have been very patient. So:

Yes. Sometimes beans make you gassy.

There. I said it. It's out there.

Here's what I want you to know: first, this is temporary. Your gut is home to billions of bacteria, and when you start eating more beans, those bacteria need a little time to adjust. Specifically, you need to build up the beneficial bacteria that help break down the oligosaccharides in beans. If you currently eat very few beans and you eat a large bowl of them all at once, your gut will complain about the sudden change. The solution is not to avoid beans; the solution is to add them gradually and consistently. Within a few weeks, most people find their digestion adjusts significantly.

Second: rinsing canned beans reduces the compounds that cause gas. Soaking dried beans and discarding the soaking water also helps. So does pressure cooking. So does cooking with kombu, dried seaweed. Cooking with aromatic herbs and spices — the way most of the world's bean traditions already do — also helps, both with flavor and with digestibility.

Third: I say this with love — the discomfort associated with beans is substantially overstated by a culture that is very good at finding reasons not to eat things that are good for us. We have eaten beans for literally 10,000 years. We can handle beans. If we make a little music, then just think of that as a love song to one of the world’s best foods.

All right. You're convinced. Or at least you're intrigued. Let's talk tactics.

If you are completely new to beans:

Start with canned. Please. I know there is a sect of the bean world that will judge you for this, and I am not part of it. Canned beans are nutritionally equivalent to dried beans that you've cooked yourself. They are already cooked. They are already ready. You open the can, you rinse them, and you have protein. The main concession to quality: get a brand with low or no added sodium, and always rinse them before using.

Start with something approachable. Hummus, if you haven't made it yourself, is a revelation — it's just chickpeas, tahini, garlic, lemon juice and salt. A blender helps. Make it once from scratch and you will never buy the store-bought kind again, or at least you'll be smug about it.

Try a white bean soup with good olive oil and garlic and some wilted greens. Try black beans with cumin and lime over rice. Try lentil soup. These are not complicated. These are Tuesday dinner.

If you already eat beans and want to eat more:

Go wider. There are hundreds of varieties of beans, and most of us cycle through three or four. Turns out, the dried bean section at your grocery store is the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Seek out a mail-order heirloom bean company — Rancho Gordo is the classic, and their beans will change your life, but there are others, such as Primary Beans and Foodocracy — and order something you've never heard of. Scarlet Runner beans. Calypso beans. Royal Corona. Christmas Lima. These varieties have flavor profiles that are genuinely startling — nutty, earthy, sweet, complex. And with some easy cooking strategies, you also get an incredible secondary product: The liquid gold that is the cooking water, a silky, starchy, delicious thing that can enrich soups, stews, and purees.

Go global. The bean cuisines of the world are wildly diverse. Ethiopian misir wot — spiced red lentils — is one of the most intensely flavored things I have ever eaten. Indian dal in its hundreds of forms is some of the most nuanced cooking on the planet. Brazilian feijoada, a black bean stew with various additions, is a weekend project that will fill your kitchen with the best smell you can imagine. Mexican frijoles de olla — beans in the pot, cooked simply with onion and herbs — are perfect. The global bean canon is your oyster.

One very simple thing you can do starting tomorrow:

Keep a can of beans in your pantry at all times. When you're making a salad, throw in some chickpeas. When you're making pasta, add some white beans. When you're making tacos, swap the meat for spiced black beans one night. These are not sacrifices. These are additions. Upgrades. The bean is not the poor substitute for the thing you really wanted; the bean, done right, is the thing you wanted.

I want to close with this:

Beans have a kind of humility about them that I find appealing in a world of overclaiming. They do not come in sleek packaging with 14 benefits listed on the side. They sit in a can or a bag and they wait for you. They have been doing this for millennia, quietly feeding humanity through famines and wars and hard winters and long journeys. The oldest cultivated food crop in the Western Hemisphere. The backbone of cuisines on every continent. The common thread through every community where people have figured out how to live well and live long.

They are cheap. They are nutritious. They are versatile in ways that I’ve spent decades exploring and still don't feel like I've gotten to the bottom of. They are good for the soil and the water and the atmosphere. They are, in a very real sense, one of the best deals available in the food world.

And they taste great. Let's not forget that. That first thing. That most important thing.

The waiter at Maximo Bistrot in Mexico City, when Carl and I told him we were there for the beans? He smiled like he understood completely. He brought us each a bowl of cacahuate beans with epazote and crema, and to quote my husband, “Chile!” I am not exaggerating when I tell you it was one of the great food moments of my life. Not in spite of it being "just beans." Because of exactly what it was.

There is no "just" about beans. There is only beans — in their full, magnificent, world-nourishing, body-sustaining, climate-helping, 10-000-year-old glory.

And that is why you should eat more of them. Thank you.