BEAN YEAR

What bean dishes are you making for Thanksgiving?

Lenin in Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism hammers home the point that colonies are firstly economic. The hand in glove development of Capitalism with racialized aspects is a thread that runs through our relationships with our foods and traditions.  

I was struck by this when I first visited the Plymouth Plantation. The docents, like docents at many living history museums, had to dance around some very uncomfortable truths about the early settlers and why they were here. The emphasis is placed on some appeal to religious freedom, but when we follow the money, the capital, we are quickly reminded that the Plymouth Plantation or the similar Jamestown and larger Virgnia Company were funded by Bankers and hereditary Landlords in Britain. They were privately held stock holding companies. There’s an early scene in Downton Abbey when Papa Downtown finds out he’s lost a lot in the Teapot Dome scandal, these were the same sort of absentee stock projects but a few hundred years earlier.

Something the docents like to point out at Plymouth is that they weren’t legally allowed to build ovens. It was built into the company charter that all food had to be supplied back home in Merry England. All their baked bread, which was a huge part of their diet, had to be shipped to them, they were not allowed nor expected to provision themselves and become self sustaining, rather they were there to work and produce commodities like an overseas factory. Eventually of course these rules were relaxed as the friction and contradictions between the religious objectives and the capitalist objectives collided. The settlers had absolutely intended on permanent settlements.

The First Thanksgiving was in November 1621 when this new colony shared a meal with a delegation from the Wampanoag people and nation that must have featured beans, Phaselous vulgaris. The modern northeast tribes still raise their own ancestral bean varieties today.

I don’t feel any compunction to square the mythology of Thanksgiving, nor do I need to make any sort of apologetic. If American Myths need defense, I will not be the be the person to do it. The friction between the capital interests of the colonies versus the theocratic and prejudiced intentions of the colonist still exists within American society today. I don’t need to shy away from this or make excuses for it: it’s bad.

And I probably shouldn’t dwell on all this if I’m trying to sell beans. But this project is about experiencing and learning that our foods cannot be separated from our histories, especially as it relates to vital Americas crop like Phaseolus vulgaris, the common beans. 

The modern Thanksgiving meal in the US is inseparable from the history of the land. The roasted turkey, corn in the muffins, pumpkins in the pie, and the green beans in a casserole are all foods from here.

Oregon, where I live now, is famous for canned green beans, which is also Phaseolus vulgaris that were selected for their green pod. There are some great write ups from Oregon history projects about the cultural aspects of the green bean harvest and processing at packing plants like Norpac. I have generations of family members who picked the beans in the summer piece meal, much as people still do today. I have family members and friends who were in the union at Norpac up until they declared bankruptcy and shuttered. The thing that’s called Norpac today is a shadow of what it was.

For green bean casserole, we can have fun arguing over whether homemade fried onions or those crispy canned ones are better for a topping. We can do experiments on which creamed soup product works best in the mix with the green beans. Personally, I try to make it a point to buy Northwest grown and packed beans from a processor that’s union. And when I sit down with my family on Thursday, that’s what I think about. I have worked in food manufacturing most of my life, the people sitting at the table around me and generations before us were proud agricultural workers, making food for ourselves and our communities. I welcome the cultural shift of thanksgiving toward a harvest festival. We can’t acknowledge our ancestors and their work to feed us enough.

So, at the risk of being too sincere, what bean dish are you making for Thursday? What did your family grow and make? What will it mean for you? Are there any beans involved?

Hesitantly posting, 

Brian

BEANYEAR