Chickpea

• 1. Introduction

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  Chickpea, known scientifically as Cicer arietinum, is one of the oldest cultivated plants on earth, and the oldest archaeological evidence of it was found in Syria. Long before writing, before bronze, before the wheel became widespread, people in the ancient Near East were already selecting and growing this small, protein-rich seed. That is not a minor footnote. It means the chickpea was part of the First Agricultural Revolution itself, roughly ten thousand years ago, alongside wheat, barley, peas, and lentils.

  Today, in 2023, world production stands at 16.5 million tonnes a year. India alone accounts for 75 percent of that figure. The word for this plant has roots that stretch back to the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe, between 4,500 and 2,500 BCE. A snack eaten in the streets of Mexico, a paste on a plate in Beirut, a fritter from Sicily, a Yiddish tradition at a naming ceremony for a newborn boy: the chickpea has travelled farther and taken on more shapes than almost any other food crop.

  How did a single legume native to a small corner of what is now Turkey and Syria end up feeding people on six continents? And what does modern genomic science reveal about the plant that ancient farmers could not have imagined?

• 2. Ten Thousand Years of Cultivation

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  Archaeological sites in modern Syria, including Tell El-Kerkh and Tell Abu Hureyra, have yielded traces of chickpeas from the 8th millennium BCE. Samples from Tell El-Kerkh contain evidence of both the cultivated Cicer arietinum and its wild relative Cicer reticulatum, which is native to a relatively small area in southeastern Turkey and nearby parts of Syria. That wild species is still considered the progenitor of every chickpea grown today.

  From Syria and Turkey, cultivation moved outward over thousands of years. Additional discoveries at Cayonu in Turkey date from between 7500 and 6800 BCE, and finds at Hacilar in Turkey push the record to 5450 BCE. By 3300 BCE, cultivation was well documented across Egypt and the Middle East. During the Bronze Age, chickpeas reached Crete and upper Egypt; specimens from 1400 BCE were found at Deir el-Medina. Specimens from 1900 BCE were uncovered at Tell Bazmusian, showing the crop had also spread eastward.

  The Indian subcontinent has its own documented record. Archaeological evidence of chickpea cultivation at sites including Lal Quila, Sanghol, Inamgaon, Nevasa, Hulas, Senuwar, and Daimabad dates from between 1750 and 1500 BCE. By the Iron Age, cultivation had reached as far south as Lalibela in Ethiopia. The Spanish and Portuguese then carried chickpea cultivation to the New World in the 16th century, completing a spread that had taken more than eight thousand years.

• 3. The Name and Its Travels

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  The Latin word cicer appeared around 700 BCE, probably borrowed from the word kickere used by the Pelasgians, who inhabited northern Greece before Greek-speaking tribes arrived. That Latin root gave rise to the French pois chiche, and in turn to chich-pease in Old English.

  A parallel lineage runs through Greek. The Proto-Indo-European root denoting a pea evolved into the Greek word erebinthos, which appears in The Iliad in around 800 BCE and again in Theophrastus's Historia Plantarum around 300 BCE. That Greek thread eventually gave rise to the Spanish garbanzo, which entered American English as early as 1759.

  The scientific name carries its own story. Carl Linnaeus formally described the plant in 1753 in the first edition of Species Plantarum, using the binomial system for the first time for this species. He placed it in the genus Cicer, the old Latin term for chickpeas, citing Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's 1694 publication Elemens de botanique. Tournefort himself had drawn on names used since antiquity. The specific epithet arietinum refers to the seed's resemblance to the head of a ram. Pliny the Elder noted exactly that connection in Naturalis Historia, and the Roman agricultural writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, writing around 64 CE, recorded that the chickpea was called arietillum for the same reason.

• 4. Desi, Kabuli, and the Art of Selective Breeding

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  Domestication was not a single event. It was a centuries-long process of selecting plants that produced large seeds with no dormancy period, seeds easy to separate from pods, and a predictable ripening time so a whole field could be harvested at once. That selective pressure produced distinct varieties.

  The Desi variety is the most common chickpea in South Asia, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Iran. It has small, dark seeds with a rough coat; coloring ranges from black to green to speckled. In Hindi it is called desi chana, meaning native chickpea, or kala chana, meaning black chickpea. It can be hulled and split to make chana dal, a staple across the Indian subcontinent.

  The Kabuli variety dominates the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It is larger than Desi, tan-colored, and smooth-coated. Kabuli was introduced to India in the 18th century, arriving from Afghanistan, and carries its geographic origin in its Hindi name: kabuli chana. Theophrastus, writing between 350 and 287 BCE in Historia Plantarum, already noted that chickpeas differed in size, color, taste, and shape, listing varieties he called 'rams' and 'vetch-like' chickpeas alongside intermediate forms.

  One of the most consequential breeding choices was the shift to spring sowing. The wild relatives of Cicer arietinum grow through winter and are harvested in spring. In the Near East, more than 80 percent of annual rainfall falls between December and February, and growing in those damp months exposed crops to Ascochyta blight, caused by Didymella rabiei, which caused crop failures. Recorded evidence shows that by the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire, summer cropping had already become standard practice.

• 5. Pathogens and the Yield Ceiling

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  From 1978 until 1995, the worldwide number of pathogens recorded on chickpeas increased from 49 to 172, of which 35 were documented in India alone. The most widely distributed pathogen is Ascochyta rabiei, present in 35 countries; Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. ciceris appears in 32 countries; Uromyces ciceris-arietini in 25; bean leafroll virus in 23; and Macrophomina phaseolina in 21.

  Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. ciceris, found in most major pulse crop-growing areas, causes regular yield reductions of 10 to 15 percent. Ascochyta disease spreads through wet weather, with spores carried to new plants by wind and water splash. The same cold, damp conditions that promote high yields also happen to favor the pathogens that destroy them.

  That tension has stalled progress. The stagnation in yield improvement over recent decades is directly linked to susceptibility to these organisms. Research into cold-resistant varieties, for example, must always run alongside pathogen-resistance breeding because the cold conditions that benefit the crop also allow Ascochyta rabiei and Fusarium oxysporum to flourish. Marker-assisted selection, which identifies favorable genes directly, has become the main tool researchers are using to break through this ceiling.

• 6. What the Chickpea Feeds

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  Hummus is the Arabic word for chickpeas. The preparation most people associate with the word, ḥummuṣ bi ṭaḥīna, combines cooked and ground chickpeas with tahini, which is sesame seed paste. By 2010, 5 percent of Americans consumed hummus regularly, and it was present at some point in 17 percent of American households.

  Falafel is made by soaking chickpeas and then coarsely grinding them with herbs and spices before shaping and frying. In Spain, chickpeas appear in cocido madrileño and in tapas cooked with spinach. In Sicily, chickpea flour is fried into panelle fritters. In Italy, the same flour makes the flatbread farinata, also called socca. The Shan people of Burma were the first known to make what is now called Burmese tofu from chickpea flour. In South Asian cooking, the flour known as besan serves as a batter for pakoras; in Kannada it is called kadlehittu and used to make the sweet dish Mysore pak.

  In Mexico, guasanas or garbanza is a street snack: green chickpeas cooked in water and salt, kept warm in a steamer, and served in a plastic bag. Ashkenazi Jews traditionally serve whole boiled chickpeas, called arbes in Yiddish, at the Shalom Zachar celebration held for baby boys. In 1793, a German writer noted that ground, roasted chickpeas were being used as a coffee substitute in Europe. During the First World War, Germany grew them for exactly that purpose.

• 7. Nutrition, Cooking, and the Body

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  Cooked chickpeas are 60 percent water, 27 percent carbohydrates, 9 percent protein, and 3 percent fat. In a 100-gram reference amount, they supply 690 kilojoules of food energy. They are a rich source of folate at 43 percent of the Daily Value and manganese at 45 percent of the Daily Value.

  Cooking changes chickpeas in specific ways. Heat inactivates antinutritional factors that are sensitive to temperature, which increases protein digestibility, the essential amino acid index, and the protein efficiency ratio. Raffinose, sucrose, and other reducing sugars diffuse out of the chickpea into the cooking water, reducing or eliminating those compounds from the final food. Fat and mineral content drop significantly with cooking. B vitamins including riboflavin, thiamin, niacin, and pyridoxine dissolve into cooking water at different rates.

  Germination offers a different nutritional profile. A 2002 study comparing germination with three cooking methods, autoclaving, microwave cooking, and boiling, found that all cooking treatments improved protein digestibility. Losses of B vitamins and minerals were smaller when chickpeas were cooked by microwave than by boiling or autoclaving. Chickpeas also contain oligosaccharides, including raffinose, stachyose, and verbascose, which humans cannot digest; gut bacteria ferment them instead, producing flatulence in some people. Removing the husks before serving can prevent this effect.

  Chickpea leaves carry a significantly higher mineral content than either cabbage leaves or spinach leaves, and in regions where the crop is grown, they are consumed as cooked vegetables, particularly in populations where micronutrient deficiency is a concern.

• 8. The Genome and What Comes Next

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  A collaboration of 20 research organizations, led by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, sequenced CDC Frontier, a Kabuli chickpea variety, and identified more than 28,000 genes along with several million genetic markers. Sequencing has now been completed for 90 chickpea genotypes, including several wild species.

  Phosphorus and nitrogen are central to how the plant grows. Higher levels of inorganic phosphorus at every dose incrementally increase the height of the chickpea plant. A combination of phosphorus nutrition and water supply has been shown to produce a 12 percent increase in crop yield. Nitrogen is more complicated: high doses inhibit yield, and drought stress interferes with nitrogen uptake and fixation in the roots. Trials have shown that Cicer arietinum differs from other plant species in its ability to draw mineral nitrogen from soil even under drought stress.

  Heat treatment opens a different avenue. Treating chickpeas with a constant heat source increases their protein content almost threefold. For animal feed, this matters: ruminant diets can be supplemented with 300 grams per kilogram or more of raw chickpea seeds with good results, while non-ruminant diets can incorporate 200 grams per kilogram of raw chickpeas to support egg production and growth in birds and pigs. With the genome now mapped and marker-assisted selection underway, the plant that farmers first chose in ancient Turkey is still being shaped by human hands.