TEPARY Phaseolus acutifolius
Which brings us to the final bean in this box, and another bean that we must absolutely support increased use and harvest of: Tepary.
Native to the US Southwest through to Central America, Tepary is related to the common bean, runner beans, and lima beans, this one is even more adapted to arid dry farming.
I source these from Ramona Farms, an American Indian owned farm that works to protect and build up the harvest of indigenous crops. It serves as an example of building farms and supply chains of these sustainable crops that are less represented in our diets. Similar to how I pushed Palouse grown lentils in the second box, or 4 Corners dry farmed Pinto beans in the first box, these Tepary show that there are already resilient sustainable crops, we can add to themwith Honey Locust or Mesquite, and we need to support them by, primarily, eating them. Yum! What an excellent task to have!
MOTH BEANS AND HORSE GRAM
There are other notable extreme drought tolerant legumes which I don’t have space in these boxes to send you but I should mention at least two of them.
The moth bean, Vigna aconitifolia, and horse gram, Macrotyloma uniflorum, are both grown in dry regions of the Indian subcontinent and some in Africa. They are often intercropped with more commercially significant beans or dry land crops like the millets, to ensure that if those crops fail, at least there will be something grown. They further showcase the variability of agriculture and diet that we should be exploring and supporting but aren’t. As I said at the top of this letter, the choices we are given for our food are intentionally truncated and narrowed to align with what’s cheapest. We have a lot of options for brands to eat, but the variation between each one is smaller than we might think. Many of the choices about what we eat are made for us before we ever go to the grocery store or stop for some fast food on the way home.
At the same time, we are just too busy and stressed out to have the time to take these choices in our own hands. That’s why I’ve tried to highlight foods that can be eaten on the go out of hand with no or minimal preparation, ie, snack foods, fast foods, convenience foods.
But I do hope to help provide better options. To offer better food than just the poorest quality Cargill or whoever can get away with because we’re all too tired or just don’t know to demand better, as if they would even listen to us. The whole point of this project is to broaden our relationship with arguably the most important plant family our species has a relationship with: Fabaceae. If you’re reading this, you’ve chosen to “Say Yes ToBeans” and you’ve experienced so much more that the world and our lives can offer.
As always, I appreciate the support, the next box is Peanuts and Soybeans, I’m already emailing with a Japanese distributor that carries freeze dried natto so it should be another weird one,
May the bean be with you,
Brian
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