Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. This is where beans come from.
I mean, not all of them, but this is a bean-producing plant — one of the
prettiest bean-producing plants there is. Purple hyacinth, also known as lablab or Indian bean,
lots of different names. It's so pretty that people use it as an ornamental, for decoration.
This one is growing in the state botanical garden at University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
an absolutely enchanting place that you can visit for free and you should. They also use purple
hyacinth as an ornamental because its beans are toxic unless you cook them properly. But that's
hardly unusual for beans. As few as four raw kidney beans will make you puke your guts out
and a lot more could kill you. Raw, ones I mean. Properly cooked kidney beans are just fine.
Certain wellness influencers will tell you in breathless terms that beans contain toxins and
anti-nutrients and yeah, they do, but that's why you cook them. Cooking them fixes the problem.
Beans are great. Hey, what even are beans? Beans, like most other foods humans eat, are
seeds. Specifically, they are seeds from a very widespread and diverse family of plants known as
fabaceae. Not all fabaceae species produce edible pods or seeds, but those that do we
commonly refer to as legumes. Some legumes species are vines, like lablab here. This is from Africa,
by the way, originally. Another veining species is the runner bean from Central America.
And the big one that grows on vines is peas. Yes, peas are beans. Pisum sativum is the species name,
and there are many different cultivars, all descended from a wild ancestor around
the Mediterranean. Here's another one from the eastern Mediterranean — the chickpea, also a bean.
Those are the pods that chickpeas come out of, and they grow on these little bushes.
Most beans that you'd think of grow on bushes, like peanuts — beans, not nuts
of course. And they're not from Africa, as is commonly believed. They're from South America,
though there is a similar species native to West Africa called the bambara nut or bambara bean.
Native to East Asia, of course, is the soybean. That's another bushy legume species. Also in Asia
they certainly love the immature sprouts of mung beans, but mung beans are native to India. That's
what they look like if you've only ever seen the sprouts. Also in India, they love their lentils,
but lens culinaris is originally from the Middle East, another little bush. Lima
beans from the Americas come in bushy and vining varieties, as do cowpeas originally from Africa,
as do common beans, phaseolus vulgaris, another species native to the Americas. Probably most
other beans you've heard of are simply different cultivars of the common bean.
Black beans, kidney beans, pintos — they're all just different varieties of common bean.
Green beans are common beans — again, bushes with a little tendency to vine when permitted. But not
all legumes are bushes or vines. Some are trees, like the whole Acacia genius — lots of trees
with big honkin' pods. In a different genius, but still a legume, we have the Kentucky coffeetree.
Like many beans its pods are super poisonous raw, but Native Americans roasted the beans and brewed
them in a hot beverage that reminded European settlers of coffee. Real coffee is not a legume,
which is why coffee beans are not considered true beans, even though they are seeds and all beans
are seeds. Are beans vegetables, or are they more like grains? I mean they're seeds, and grains are
seeds. So why aren't beans grains, or why aren't they fruits? Botanically, the whole seed pod of a
legume is technically the fruit of the plant. So when you eat the whole pod, as in sugar snap peas
for example, you are technically eating a fruit that has seeds inside it, as all fruits do.
But culinarily, we tend to reserve the term fruit for really sweet, juicy things that
maybe we'd eat for dessert. When you're talking about a fruit that's less sweet and less juicy,
and you'd probably use it in savory dish, we tend to throw that under vegetables. I mean,
good green beans are generally pretty sweet, but you probably wouldn't use them in a dessert. So
I guess that's why we call them vegetables. Fresh peas we think of as vegetables, but why? They've
been removed from the pod — they are straight up seeds. Why do we think of them as a veggie and not
something closer to, say, grains? Well, sometimes we do think of them as being something closer to
grains when, say, we eat dried peas rather than eating them when they are young and fresh.
Dried would be field peas, AKA split peas. These are the same species as fresh or garden peas.
They've just been dried and popped out of their hulls. Here, you can see the hull really clearly
on these lentils. When the bean is dried, the hull gets papery and falls off pretty easily.
If you take it off the lentil, you get what they call dal in India. If you take it off a dried pea,
you get split peas because the two embryonic leaf type things inside every single bean just
split apart if the hull isn't there to hold them together. But anyway, we do tend to
think of beans as being vegetables when we eat them young, fresh, tender, right off the plant,
whether in their pods or out of their pods. Lablab, like these in the garden, are often eaten
fresh in the pod — usually when they're a little younger. This pod has aged pretty hard at this
point. But if we open her up and check out the seeds inside, there are the beans themselves.
And in this fresh state, I'd call them vegetables. Here's another one. The beans inside are green.
They remind me of broad beans and lima beans, which are also often eaten fresh as vegetables.
Fresh beans like these used to be a rare, seasonal treat, but they're easily frozen now. So we have
frozen, fresh lima beans and fresh peas all year long. Back in the day, if you wanted the beans to
keep for any length of time, you would have to dry them. Most often when you intend to produce dried
beans, what you do is you just leave them out to dry on the plant as the plant dies back for the
season. That's what these soybeans are doing. The reason we call field peas "field peas" is
they've been allowed to dry out in the field. In their dried form, we refer to all legume seeds
as pulses, and we treat them a little more like grains. We sometimes grind them into flour,
or more often we make porridge out of them, just like grains. We maybe soak them overnight,
mostly to accelerate their cooking when they finally do go in the pot, then we boil them in
plenty of water. And some of them burst, releasing their soluble fiber into the water and thickening
it into a gravy that enrobes the seeds. This is exactly what happens when we make a porridge
out of oats. Oatmeal is boiled dried seeds as well. But when we do it with legumes, we don't
think of it as a porridge, for some reason. Funny thing is, grains can be vegetables just as well as
beans can be. Think about sweet corn. That's a grain, but we harvest it fresh right off
of the plant. And so we call it and consider it a vegetable. When we want to consider it as a grain,
we leave it to dry in the field. That's why we call that field corn. Yes,
sweet corn is also a different cultivar from field corn, but they're both the same species. And it's
the same deal with legumes. Humans have taken legume species and developed versions of them,
cultivars, that work better fresh in the pod, fresh out of the pod or dried out of the pod.
Field peas and sweet peas are usually different cultivars, but they are the same species.
So again, why aren't beans grains? Well, because botanically, they just aren't.
Beans are the seeds of legumes and grains are the seeds of grasses. These are just two totally
different families of plants, different orders. And because grains and beans are so far apart on
the evolutionary tree, it should not be surprising that they are different nutritionally. Beans are
still seeds, and so like grains, the most abundant macro-nutrient in beans is carbohydrates.
Make no mistake about it: beans have a lot of carbs. But beans also have a lot more fiber than
grains, mostly because we usually eat the whole seed when we eat beans. Grains we tend to refine
more. And of course, beans have a lot of protein, which is probably good for your diet and mine.
Why do beans have so much more protein than other seeds? Because legumes have a special symbiotic
relationship with soil bacteria called rhizobia. These bacteria form little nodules on the legume
roots. They convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia that enriches the soil and feeds
the plant. Plants need nitrogen to make protein. Grasses also host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, but
legumes are way better at it. This makes legumes great for the soil. They replenish
nitrogen depleted by other crops and it makes legumes a great high-protein food for us.
And legumes are great for us, despite the fact that yes, they are generally poisonous
when raw — some more so than others. Legumes contain lectins, a class of proteins known
as anti-nutrients because they bind with certain carbs, making them undigestible.
They cause tons of other problems in our body as well. They mess with our cells, our blood,
all kinds of badness, and red kidney beans have a lot of lectins. Documented poisonings are rare,
but here's a really old case from the British Medical Journal. 1976, a group of school boys
on holiday came back to the hostel and found their chicken had gone off. So they improvised a dinner,
including some kidney beans they'd gotten soaking the night before. They were not cooked, but they
were soft enough to chew, so the boys just ate them. And a couple hours later, they all started
puking their guts out. Next came the diarrhea. One of them needed intravenous fluids to recover.
Subsequent analysis ruled out any cause other than the lectins in the raw kidney beans.
Here's a super sad case report from the US 2017, middle aged nurse with a lifelong eating disorder.
Twice a week, she would grind up four to eight raw kidney beans and swallow them. She did this
to ensure that she would throw up most of her food and be able to socially pass off her bulimia as
food poisoning. Yeah, good thing she eventually sought help, apparently. But if you want to avoid
accidental lectin poisoning, all you got to do is cook your beans. Heat destroys or otherwise
deactivates the lectins. You do have to use enough heat. There's research showing that,
like, slow cookers might not get beans hot enough to deactivate the lectins. You have to
boil them for some duration of time, 10 minutes, longer. It depends on the kind of bean and not all
beans contain hazardous amounts of lectin. Look up the specifics for your beans if you're
concerned. Personally, I really enjoy a fresh, raw green bean from the garden every now and then. And
they've never bothered my tummy yet, though that doesn't stop people on the internet from yelling
at me, "What about the lectins?" Lablab here have a fair bit of lectin and they have cyanogenic
glycosides — molecules that are converted in the body into cyanide. It's another reason why people
often just use this as an ornamental, but the traditional way to eat lablab beans or the whole
pods is just to boil them real good and discard the water. Some recipes call for several changes
of water. Wow, look at all that purple bean color coming out of the beans. What a waste.
Sadly, beans are often a lot less pretty cooked than they are raw, but you gotta cook them. If I
squeeze them, they pop right out of their hull. There's the two embryonic leave things that
would split apart if this were dried. But it's a fresh bean, and so it tastes like a delicious,
fresh vegetable, because beans can be vegetables. Oh no, it's poison. It's poison. I'm just kidding.
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Oh hey, one more fun bean fact. That little eye on beans, that's called the hilum. It's
where the bean connected with the pod as it was growing inside.
It's literally the bean's belly button. Just thought you'd want to know that.