BEAN YEAR

Box 4 launches this Friday!

Sweet bean snacks: amanatto and candied chickpeas, Desert Beans: carob, mesquite, and tepary

Grass Peas ; Lathyrus sativus

Which in turn brings us to a different wild pea, the grass pea, also known as the famine pea. In small quantities as part of a diverse diet this is a perfectly reasonable food, but during times of drought or societal disturbance like war, people would harvest these wild peas in large quantities. The cruel irony is that it has a toxin that causes a neurodegenerative disease named after the genus: lathyrism. So already weak people are made paralyzed by eating just this pea. There is a distressing painting by Goya, Gracias á la almorta (Thanks to the grass pea), about people starving during Napolean’s siege of Madrid and paralyzed from eating this pea. 

Many wild Fabaceae plants can have this toxin. Notably, there’s increasing evidence that Chris McCandless, of Into the Wilddied in Alaska fame, had been eating a lot of Hedysarum alpinum roots. Eating bean roots, as we saw in the last box with Licorice and Astragalus, or more obviously similar with Hopniss, Apios americana, is not uncommon. They can be a starchy food. Likewise many beans are toxic in other ways, for example the Lupin in this very Bean Box or even Kidney Beans from Box 1, have to be processed before they’re safe to eat. Anyway, Chris was eating this bean root, and we now know that it contains chemicals that lead to Lathyrism, so it probably contributed to why he grew weak and died. 

When I was younger, in my 20s, I was often compared to him. I would go off into the woods to work for seasons for the Forest Service. For a long time I was resentful of this. I thought to myself, “I’m smarter than that, I would be more careful. I wouldn’t die.” But as I’ve gotten older, especially learning about wild food and Fabaceae toxicity and processing, I’ve become more sympathetic. I can see myself doing this same thing and dying this same way. How am I better than all those who’ve died of starvation during war eating the only food they can find? How am I better than people who knew or didn’t know or made a mistake or were bystanders, irrelevant, and just died anyway?  How are you better than them?

faba memento mori

Sweet peas –   Lathyrus odoratus

I always plant my sweet peas too early. These are, of course, not edible – similar risk of Lathyrism as the Grass Peas. But they are lovely plants and the smell is intoxicating. Please, when you choose to grow sweet peas, insist that they have the lovely smell. I worry that commercial plant breeders, in order to select for fantastic flowers that make pretty pictures in the catalogs and internet, do not select for the smell. Over the last half decadeI’ve made much more of an effort to make our home garden full of lovely smelling plants and flowers and it has transformed our relationship with our home. For many years I was singularly focused on food production. Like we talked about in the last box, there is a broad cultural panic about self sufficiency. From “prepper” culture to “cottage-core” people seem to feel singularly responsible for producing food for their lives. I also succumbed to this for many years. I think, at least for me, it was a response to our modern precarity, that our jobs and relationship to our homes can be lost on a whim, but also that we are alone, no one else, and certainly not the larger society, will help us if we fall. But then I heard a phrase “plant sweet peas where the noses goeses”, meaning, put nice smelling plants where people are near them, where their noses are. So for around 5 years now we’ve been planting sweet peas along a wattle fence at the front of our yard and they spill out into the sidewalk and all summer they smell so lovely for us and for our neighbors. Not only has planting more flowers softened our, sometimes manic, attempt at growing food (how many plum trees do we really need?), but it’s also pushed out into the world, into an immediate relationship with other people. So, while in some ways completely useless, sweet peas are again poisonous, it’s helped me learn that something that’s simply beautiful, and that you share with others, is also important. 

I will briefly note that there is another beautiful weedy pea, Lathyrus latifolius, that superficially looks like a sweet pea but is perennial and has no scent, also similarly poisonous. 

 

Pigeon peas – Toor dal – Cajanus cajan 

There were two domestication events for Pigeon Peas – one in India and one in Africa. I have chosen the Indian preparation of these bean, hulled and split, but next year I will swap for the whole version, hopefully from an African or Caribbean supplier.I’m including it here for a couple of reasons. One, to show the fungibility of bean family words like “bean” or “pea”, that these words cross very unrelated genuses. In a later box we’ll talk about cowpea, Vigna, which is also black eyed peas, nothing related to Pisum at all. But also to, again, reinforce that many bean family plants are very drought resistant. Plants like Pigeon Peas require very little attention to cultivation, no watering, no fertilization, very little weeding even. They are a reliable cropeven in hard times, that, unlike the grass peas mentioned above, are not poisonous. We should be growing and subsequently eating a much greater variety of legumes. Hopefully introducing them to you helps pave the way for wider adoption.