“Of course beans count as a vegetable!” I said to my wife. We have this house rule that it’s okay to eat mac and cheese for dinner so long as you add a vegetable. If I may ‘spill the beans’, I’m obsessed with them. Each one is tastier than the last: garbanzo bean, black bean, kidney. The butter bean, which is just lima beans with a new identity. I’ll often eat black beans as a meal. When my then-fiance had her bachelorette party they played a kind of Newlywed game where she was asked to name my favorite food. She said without hesitation, “BEANS!”
“Beans?” her friends asked. “What do you mean beans? Like baked beans? Refried beans?”
“Literally just beans.”
So I was shocked when she said beans don’t count as eating your vegetables. Determined to defend my favorite food, I dug deep to learn what is and isn’t a vegetable. What I found is that it’s complicated but TL;DR you’re darn tootin’ they’re veggies.
“Beans aren’t a vegetable; they’re a legume,” they say. That is our first step of the pedantic journey ahead. Legumes are the common name of the family Fabaceae which includes peanuts, peas, green beans, clovers, and lupines. What do you notice about that list? What I see are a nut, two vegetables, a weed, and a garden flower. However the peanut is not actually a nut. So why does it come in the can of mixed nuts? Clover is an interesting case too. I grow crimson clover as flowers and as cover crops. Clover used to be a natural part of lawns until the 1950’s when it became fashionable to have all grass instead. Nut, weed, vegetable: these words aren’t set in stone fruit, they’re colloquial and they change all the time.
“Beans aren’t a vegetable; they’re a protein,” they say. Is the implication that their protein content puts them in the meats group? For sure, beans are very high in protein. That’s part of their magic! Loaded with fiber, rich in nutrients, and they even have complete protein. Amazing! There’s this new trend where the food trucks will ask you to “pick your protein.” Usually the choices will be like beef, chicken, or tofu which is made from soybeans. High protein content does not make beans a meat though. Kale is high in protein too, and if anybody is eating it they’re not grouping it in the “protein/ meat” category. Avocados are high in protein and they’re a vegetable. Or are they a fruit?
It would help us here to make a quick detour into basic botany. A fruit in the botanical sense is the ovary of a flowering plant that contains seeds. However fruit has another definition which is culinary and more limited. Fruit (botanical) includes zucchini, tomato, and almond. But as the saying goes “knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad”. This is another root of semantic confusion. Some words for plants are botanical, some are culinary. Fabaceae is strictly a botanical word. Nut and fruit are both culinary and botanical. Vegetable is strictly culinary. That’s right. There is no botanical definition of vegetable, except as a distinction from animal life or mineral substances. Oxford English Dictionary lays out this culinary definition: “a plant or part of a plant used as food such as cabbage, potato, carrot, or bean.” Did you catch that? Right after the Oxford comma was the bean. For an essay about how beans are vegetables I could end it right here with a mic drop. But I can sense you rolling your eyes. You’re not convinced the scholars at Oxford English Dictionary can decide for us what is and isn’t a vegetable. The Food Pyramid still has its claws in us even today.
When the USDA first erected the Food Pyramid in 1992 beans were grouped with meat, eggs and nuts (2-3 servings recommended daily). They were one level up from the separate vegetable group. This seems to be the source of the idea that beans are not vegetables but legumes and part of the protein/ meat group. The USDA based the Food Pyramid on a similar Swedish model, replacing previous suggestions like the Food Wheel and the Basic 7. Beans have been recategorized through these guides over the years until most recently in 2011 when Michelle Obama teamed up with the USDA to put MyPlate on our tables. Now beans are rightly grouped where they belong, with the vegetables.
These shifting goalposts are why I’m not entirely convinced with Oxford’s definition either. It says that any part of the plant which is eaten is a vegetable. That includes nectarines, pistachios, even cinnamon! We usually define vegetables on our own using our colloquial culinary sensibilities. When we refer to vegetables as distinct from fruits (culinary), we mean plant parts that are nutritious and low in sugar with some exceptions. Beets are high in sugar but they don’t go in the fruit salad. Vegetables can be leaves like spinach or stalks like asparagus. They can be seeds like peas, or whole pods like green beans. They can be fruit (botanical) like squash or even roots. Vegetables can include members of the family Brassicaceae (cabbage), Cucurbitaceae (cucumber), Amaranthaceae (chard) and more. As we’ve said, legume is the common name for the family Fabaceae (beans!).
While all vegetables belong to a family, not all members of those families are vegetables. Watermelons belong to Cucurbitaceae. Sweet peas belong to Fabaceae but are not edible. The idea that legumes are not vegetables doesn’t ‘grow corn.’ Peas, green beans, and dried beans are. Clovers, peanuts, and lupines are not. By the way, green beans are unripened beans eaten with the pod or shell. We used to call them string beans but modern hybrids have done away with the string that grew in the shell.
Let’s get some pinto beans on our plate and take a closer look. When I want a healthy vegetable, I want something high in fiber and nutrients, but low in fat and sugar. Pintos are higher in Vitamin C than carrots and spinach. They absolutely dominate broccoli with dietary fiber, calcium, protein, and iron. They’re low fat and low sugar. Pinto beans have all the advantages of other vegetables and more. They make lettuce look like styrofoam. Beans are the original superfood. YUM! Why wouldn’t you want that nutrient-packed taste sensation proudly on your plate in the vegetable section? We don’t use the Food Pyramid anymore so let’s put its outdated ideas in the compost bin once and for all. The dictionary and the US government say beans are vegetables and now we can see for ourselves the reasons why.
Black beans are my go-to. Heat up a can with the juice, add onion and cumin, and scoop ‘em up with chips. Eat pinto beans! No recipe needed, they’re delightful just the way they are. Hummus is a great snack made from garbanzo beans. Then there’s the mother of all beans. The biggest and the baddest: the butter bean! They melt in your mouth. Saute them with some spices, maybe add cream sauce or even cheese. Perfection! Grow beans yourself! You won’t find an easier plant to grow. Get the kids interested in gardening. They even add nitrogen to your soil. They’re literally fertilizing the soil as they grow. Cook the pods whole as green beans. Can’t beat that! We truly don’t deserve beans. The ‘musical fruits’ are a blessing on this Earth. Holy Frijole!
References
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legume
2 https://smokymountainnews.com/lifestyle/rumble/item/31055-a-history-of-the-food-pyramid
3 https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/175199/nutrients
4 https://news.wttw.com/2021/05/01/clover-lawns-went-mainstream-maligned-now-they-re-making-comeback
5 https://www.southernexposure.com/the-major-plant-families-in-a-vegetable-garden/
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beans%2C_Beans%2C_the_Musical_Fruit
This is an A+ post, thank you for sharing your undying adoration of beans with us ❤️
First, thanks for such an enthusiastic, detailed, and entertaining write up! Not to mention educational! I, too, adore beans and eat them alone as a lunch often. May I suggest Rancho Gordo beans, I swear I don’t work for them lol but getting to try all the amazing varieties they have has been so delightful!
Amen! I try to always prepare from dry beans. Canned beans are never as tasty and cost 10 times as much. The InstantPot makes it take under a minute of work and less than a 40 minute wait. If you can plan 40 minutes ahead there is no reason to bust into cans on the regular.
One of the worst parts of traveling is the difficulty of finding my daily helping of beans.
@confusedbytheBasics @NataliePortland
I just cooked dry beans in my instant pot for the first time this evening! (Well, technically, black-eyed peas).
It was super simple, came out a touch mushy though! This was with 8 minutes of pressure cooking and sitting until depressurization occurred. Do you have a heuristic on cook time?
Late reply but I’ll share what I know…
I have the best results when I rinse dry beans in cold water, put freshly rinsed beans and enough cold water to cover plus an extra inch into the pot, add salt and a few drops of oil, cook on high pressure.
Depending the type of beans and how fresh they are the cooking time and release process is different. For black-eyed peas that are fairly fresh 6 minutes at pressure and waiting 10 minutes after the “keep warm” cycle is best for me. For older peas it can take an extra 1 to 2 minutes.
That’s for creamy mouthfeel. If you want firm ones for salads or whatever I find upping the salt and cooking an extra minute at pressure followed by immediately releasing the pressure and allowing to cool gives the best results.
I tend to buy 25 lbs at a time from the restaurant supply. Those are often extremely fresh and cheap. Like $0.60 per pound ($14-15 per bag). The first two or three batches don’t come out right but they teach me everything I need to know to cook that rest of that bag intuitively.
GL!
@confusedbytheBasics Thank you so much for those details! I really like the idea of buying in bulk and experimenting—I’ll be doing that!
I too love beans. Great write up! I was about to leave a pedantic correction that sweet peas are edible, just toxic, but then that got me thinking about what does “edible” even mean? Like how poisonous or unpalatable does something have to be for a line to be drawn? Eating it once will kill you, like death caps, or maybe eating it your entire life will increase risk of death like alcohol? Something in between like sweet peas?
Depending on context, value is also often required. That can be in the form of nutrition, taste, flavor, preservation, or appearance. Take edible gold leaf, sugar free fairly nutrition free candies, spices, or hot sauce as examples. Their ingredients too, there’s wood fiber derivatives used as fillers sometimes.
On the flip side, a gold wedding band can pass through a digestive tract quite safely, and is materially identical to edible gold leaf. Generally not considered edible though. A sheaf of printer paper? Not edible. Some small paper wrappings, often edible. Similarly a marble would pass through with no danger unless chewed. In many ways safer than a very strong hot sauce or some baking ingredients. And yet…
Edible is quite a wiggly term.
safer than a very strong hot sauce
I feel called out… haha. I’ve wondered whether I’m dissolving my intestines with the amount of hot sauce and peppers I eat…
Lol ya thank you for being kind to me about that. I edited out a bit about mushrooms bc I felt it was too distracting, but I mean we order a veggie sandwich and it comes with a portobello on it. They’re not veggies buuuuuuuut kinda maybe, right?
My only complaint is you called clover a weed.
Clovers are great, aren’t they?
Legumes are a type of vegetable.
The hill I WILL die on is that mushrooms, as a fungus, are not.
“Well technically this isn’t a 100% plant based meal because the mushrooms are not part of the plant kingdom”
Technically… neither is salt :p
All beans are tasty, indeed!
I noticed Edamame was missing from your list, and are delicious just slightly steamed and sprinkled with a little salt.
Also, when it comes to southwestern eatin’, I always prefer a mayocoba to a pinto anyday! It’s a tiny bit larger and as creamy as can be. Use exactly the same way you would a pinto or a black bean!
Yes! Edamame is a great example of a veggie!
Never heard of that other one! Can’t wait to try it
I’m a huge fan of Anasazi beans. They are red and white in a sort of calico pattern to start with, but turn a uniform creamy pink-red when cooked. They basically are like pintos but with a smoother texture, which is great.
I love those too! It’s very difficult for me to source them however… I’m lucky to live near a bunch of supermercados that have mayocoba but they don’t have the more ‘exotic’ beans beyond that
Yeah, i’ve only seen them at specialty stores in New Mexico.
I get mayocoba at Rancho Gordo! Always great
I looks like when people hear that legumes are not vegetables they assume they are somehow worse. The truth is, legumes are not vegetables, they are better. Legumes are important part of Mediterranean diet which “includes proportionally high consumption of unprocessed cereals, legumes, olive oil, fruits, and vegetables”. Vegetables are good for you but without legumes there’s no Mediterranean diet and it’s proven that this diet has many health benefits. So eat your vegetables but even more importantly, eat your legumes.
I don’t care what the classification is, I love beans. I love ‘em canned, I love ’em dried and pressure cooked, I love ‘em baked, I love ‘em on toast, I love ‘em in a chili (don’t @ people with strong opinions about beans in chili), and I love ‘em in a tortilla.
That was a fun read, cheers for sharing!
I just wish more places offered beans as an alternative protein option. I ordered a burger yesterday from this new restaurant, and their only veggie option was a “plant-based patty”. And as it turns out, it was a fake meat patty, which tasted gross. I don’t understand why they don’t just offer a bean patty instead - it’d be cheaper, healthier and tastier.
Brilliant piece. I’m hungry for trying your suggestions now. Especially your black bean, onions and cumin. Mmmm
Bro
Fuck yeah, beans!
I respectfully submit that beans are not a vegetable, they are a fruit. citation
OMG thank you for that. My essay ends with ‘magical fruits’ but I totally meant to say ‘musical fruits’ as a nod to that timeless classic. Editing that now. Keep tootin’ friend!
wait… no wait a minute. That wikipedia article says both ‘musical fruits’ and ‘magical fruits’. Well I guess both work? I’m going with Musical
I completely read past that and missed it in your essay. You truly covered all the bases.
May I also offer https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZWQMvHNOnI
Will add one more link here, just to give you something else to consider in this music of definitions, lol https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/legumes-pulses/
As a “Mediterranean” person myself, our home has always included meals with beans of one type or another on a regular basis so they are natural to my diet. As soon as the weather gets cold, I especially love the excuse to eat them more often since they are not only yummy, but feel like a comfort cozy time food. My favourite hands down are lentils, since they can be cooked in so many ways that appeal to me. At the moment one of my favourite ways to make them is super simple: slow cooked in veggie broth with some garlic cloves and chopped leeks (the latter are browned first in a little bit of olive oil), cooked until tender, with saffron, white pepper, and a pinch of salt. Serve with lemon juice and chopped fresh coriander leaf. Cheers! 👩🍳 🥰