A couple of nights ago I had just started to drift off when I realized that I had no idea, really, where beans – things like chickpeas, kidney beans, black-eyed peas – came from. Have you ever seen a lentil plant? It’s strange what you think about before going to sleep. I mentioned it to The Boy and he told me just to Google it in the morning.
Why does it matter? Because we, generally, as a society, are becoming further and further removed from the foods we eat, i.e. where it comes from, how it’s produced, how it gets to us.
It’s pretty startling when you realize that you have no clue how those cans and cans of legumes (at least at my house) came to be on the shelf. Scary actually.
So I set out to learn more. As I suspected, beans DO come from plants. I’ve just never seen any. The beans we eat are the dried seeds of those plants. I learned from this site that legumes (including peanuts) are able to take large amounts of nitrogen from the air and convert it to protein in the seeds. They also return large amounts of nitrogen to the ground and because of this the green plants are sometimes ploughed under; as an organic fertilizer.
This site from an organic farm project in Muenster, Saskatchewan has some photos of lentil plants.
So now you know. And I can sleep.
1 comment:
Who knew that legumes we're so exciting!!
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