Curated playlist
Edible legumes
- BeanFour or five raw red kidney beans can leave a person doubled over with stomachache, vomiting, and diarrhea.
- PeaThe word pea comes from a mistake: English speakers took pease for a plural and dropped the s.
- Phaseolus vulgarisFour or five raw, soaked kidney beans can make a person sick.
- Green beanGreen beans are picked before their seeds have matured. The whole young pod is eaten, not just the seeds.
- LentilThe lentil gave the optical lens its name, not the other way around.
- ChickpeaChickpeas were already being grown roughly ten thousand years ago. The oldest evidence comes from Syria.
- SoybeanThe soybean, known to botanists as Glycine max, is a legume native to East Asia, and in June 1973 the United States briefly refused to sell it abroad. Traders had misread the soybean futures market, which wrongly signaled a major shortage.…
- PeanutThe peanut, Arachis hypogaea, buries its own fruit, and its Latin species name means "under the earth." In 2023 the world produced 54 million tonnes of peanuts, with China supplying 36 percent of the total and India 19 percent. The plant…
- Vicia fabaVicia faba carries 13 GB of DNA in its cells, one of the largest genomes among diploid field crops, with a predicted 34,221 protein-coding genes. That is a heavy genetic load for a plant that looks like an ordinary garden bean. Vicia faba…
- TamarindTamarind, known to botanists as Tamarindus indica, carries a name that points to the wrong continent. In Arabic it was called tamr hindi, meaning Indian date. Yet the tree is indigenous to tropical Africa. Its pods hold a sweet and tangy…
- LiquoriceLiquorice, spelled licorice in the United States, is the name for the root of a bean-family plant called Glycyrrhiza glabra. Dig it up, and you find something that tastes sweeter than sugar. It also tastes different from sugar, and people…