'It's like a secret': why do the leguminati want to change the way we eat?

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Fans of legumes say a worldwide shift towards eating beans rather than meat would hugely benefit human health and the environment

By Damien Gayle
Nov 22, 2024

For decades they have been working underground, establishing mycorrhizal-like networks of commerce and influence, taking root in academia and institutions, and even extending their tendrils into supranational governance. Their goal is to transform the diets of people across the world, to spark a revolution in food production and consumption. They call themselves the leguminati. “When you rediscover beans, it’s something we’ve all taken for granted, and then you realise – oh my God – these are really great, it’s like a secret,” says Steve Sando, the founder of the California-based bean company, Rancho Gordo, who is, for many, the godfather of this cult. “The secret’s been revealed to them and they tend not to be able to shut up about it, because they feel they’ve discovered the world.”

Beans are enjoying a culinary renaissance and, say their advocates, it is not a moment too soon. Long thought of as bland, fiddly to cook, or poverty food, in recent years there has been growing recognition that beans are not only delicious, but that eating more of them could help solve a host of planetary and human health problems. Food production is a big cause of climate breakdown, amounting to about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Three-fifths of those emissions come from meat production, leading many to argue for a shift towards a plant-based diet.

But that does not take plants off the hook entirely. The “green revolution” of the 20th century led to an exponential increase in agricultural output, but it was via the widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilisers, a byproduct of the petrochemical industry that emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with a heating effect 300 times that of carbon dioxide. Added to that, poorly applied fertiliser runs off into rivers and waterways leading to pollution and algal blooms that kill fish and other wildlife. It was issues such as these that Josiah Meldrum, the cofounder with Nick Saltmarsh of the UK bean company Hodmedod’s, had in mind in the early 2000s when he was asked by climate campaigners in Norwich how a city such as theirs, with a population of about 122,000 then (144,000 now), could feed itself without exceeding planetary boundaries.

“It was that climate project that led us to realise quite how fantastic pulses are,” he says. “The impact of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers on global climate is massive, because they’re about 2.5-4.5% of global manmade emissions. “So if we could move away from some of those inputs and produce those field-scale crops in a low-input way, we could really make a difference, we could really start to transform things. That’s really when we began getting interested broadly in leguminous plants.” Pulses, which include beans and also lentils and chickpeas, are the dried seeds of the legume family of plants, which also counts among its members oil-seeds, such as peanuts and soya beans, and varieties more commonly eaten fresh, such as broad beans, green peas and snap peas. From a food production perspective, legumes have some remarkable properties. Perhaps most crucially, they can produce their own nitrogen.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/22/its-like-a-secret-why-do-the-leguminati-want-to-change-the-way-we-eat