Beans

Beans, widely cultivated legumes that have nourished the people of Latin America for millennia. Throughout the region, few meals lack beans. In Mexico, people typically eat mashed beans with corn tortillas, whereas in Brazil, since colonial times, a ladle of soupy beans poured over rice is the core component of many daily diets. In this way, the majority of Latin Americans survive on the near complete protein provided by a mixture of beans and rice or maize.

While hundreds of species exist, many of them indigenous to the American tropics, the multiple varieties of the common bean (phaseolus vulgaris), including dried black, pinto, and red beans, are the most widespread in Latin America. Another species, commonly known as lima or butter beans (phaseolus lunatus), is also widely grown in the region. Both were among the earliest domesticated plants of the Western Hemisphere, with evidence of their cultivation dating from 7000–5000 bce.

Archaeologists differ over the locations in which bean agriculture first developed in America, but it is now believed that it occurred independently in Mexico's Tamaulipas desert and Peru's highland Callejon de Hayulas valley. The culture gradually spread throughout North and South America well before 1492. After Columbus, Europeans eventually recognized the utility of dried beans on long ocean voyages, and their journeys helped introduce American beans throughout the world.

The production of beans has generally been taken for granted in Latin America. Their low cost and high nutritional value assured that they were always being cultivated by someone. Indians grew them with maize, weaving the vines between stalks of corn. On sugarcane plantations, captive Africans commonly received small plots of land in order to grow beans to feed themselves. Peasants invariably mixed beans with other subsistence crops. Coffee growers frequently left extra space between the rows of trees in order to intercrop beans and other vegetables.

Competing export crops and livestock land uses have caused problems for bean farming in Latin America. The expansion of soybean agriculture in the last decades of the twentieth century reduced the land devoted to growing common beans, and in Brazil the once ubiquitous black bean nearly disappeared from the market. At the same time, the population explosion caused increased demand, and bean prices skyrocketed. To keep underpaid workers fed, some governments subsidized bean farmers, while many others artificially manipulated prices. All the same, as late as 1980, small family farmers produced more than three-quarters of the beans grown in Latin America, revealing the continued decentralization of bean cultivation.

Bean supply shortages and price hikes worsened as Latin American governments tried to liberalize their economies. Strapped by heavy foreign debt burdens, officials simultaneously encouraged foreign exchange-earning export crops while cutting back on subsidies for staple crops like beans. In the inflation-plagued 1980s and 1990s, fluctuations in the availability of beans and other basic foodstuffs contributed to social and political unrest in Peru, Argentina, and Venezuela. In Brazil, the looting of supermarkets in cities such as Rio de Janeiro became commonplace in 1992.

In the twenty-first century, soybean production has continued to expand, due to the large demand from China. However, this expansion has sparked debate because Brazil in 2005 lifted its ban on genetically modified (GM) crops. GM soybeans are productive but both environmental and consumer groups have raised concerns about their unknown effects. The increase in soybean production has also been a major driver of Amazon deforestation.

See alsoCoffee Industry; Nutrition; Soybeans.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alvin Silverstein and Virginia Silverstein, Beans: All About Them (1975).

Luis López Cordovez, "Trends and Recent Changes in the Latin American Food and Agriculture Situation," in CEPAL Review (April 1982): 7-41.

Charles B. Heiser, Jr., Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food, new ed. (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Carillo, Ana María. La cocina del tomate, frijol y calabaza. Mexico City: Clío, 1998.

Long, Janet, and Luis Alberto Vargas. Food Culture in Mexico. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

                                         Cliff Welch

bean / bēn/ • n. 1. an edible seed, typically kidney-shaped, growing in long pods on certain leguminous plants. ∎  the hard seed of coffee, cocoa, and certain other plants. 2. a leguminous plant that bears such seeds in pods. • Phaseolus and other genera, family Leguminosae: numerous species, including the scarlet runner (P. coccineus), kidney bean (P. vulgaris), and broad bean (Vicia faba). 3. (also beans) inf. a very small amount or nothing at all of something (used emphatically): I didn't know beans about being a step-parent. 4. inf. a person's head, typically when regarded as a source of common sense.• v. [tr.] inf. hit (someone) on the head: Boone was nearly beaned by that wild pitch.PHRASES: full of beans inf. lively; in high spirits.a hill (or row) of beans anything of any importance or value: three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

BEANS

Ancient Jewish sources refer to several species of beans under the Hebrew name of pol qualified by various epithets. Pol itself is the broad bean (Vicia faba) which was included in the food brought to David's forces by his loyal supporters from Ammon and Gilead (ii Sam. 17:28). Its flour was added to the bread that Ezekiel was commanded to eat to symbolize the approaching destruction of Jerusalem (Ezek. 4:9). In mishnaic and talmudic times the broad bean was widely grown, being a cheap food popular especially among the poor (Tosef., bm 3:9; Sof. 21:4) and eaten with or without the husk. Another important plant was the pol ha-miẓri which, identified with the cowpea (Vigna sinensis), is a creeper which grows in summer. In mishnaic times it was highly regarded as a food for human consumption (Ned. 7:1; Shev. 2:8–9) but is now grown as fodder. To the botanical genus Vigna belongs another plant called pol he-ḥaruv which is the legume known as the yard-long bean (Vigna sesquipedalis), its Hebrew name being derived, according to the Jerusalem Talmud (Kil. 1:2, 27a), from the shape of its pods, which resembles that of the carob (ḥaruv). Another variety of the cowpea is called she'u'it (Kil. 1:1); this is the legume Vigna nilotica, which grows wild in Israel climbing river banks, or is sown as fodder. The Mishnah (ibid.) states that it is not a *mixed species (kilayim) with pol ha-lavan, the hyacinth bean (Dolichos lablab), the seed of which is used as food.

bibliography:

Loew, Flora 12 (1924), 492f.; J. Feliks, Olam ha-Ẓome'aḥ ha-Mikra'i (1957), 156–8, 318; idem, Kilei Zera'im (1967), 41–43.

[Jehuda Feliks]

bean from early times, the broad bean was a staple foodstuff (see beanfeast below), and there are various traditional rhymes recommending the best time of planting. Beans as an article of diet are proverbially associated with Leicestershire.

Beans were traditionally used in casting ballots, and the Latin tag Abstineto a fabis ‘Abstain from beans’ is understood as an injunction to abstain from meddling in affairs of state by casting one's vote in an election. The followers of Pythagoras abstained from eating beans, although the reason for this is not known.



In traditional Twelfth Night celebrations, a bean was baked into a cake, and the man in whose portion it was found became King of the Bean, and leader of the celebrations for the night.



Bean was also used to mean a coin or small sum of money, as in the informal not a bean for ‘no money’.


bean counter a person, typically an accountant or bureaucrat, perceived as placing excessive emphasis on controlling expenditure and budgets (bean here means a coin).
beanfeast a celebratory party with plenty of food and drink; originally, an annual dinner given by an employer to his employees, at which beans and bacon were regarded as an indispensable dish. The term is recorded from the early 19th century.

See also beans.

Bean ★★★ 1997 (PG-13)

Big screen adaptation of rubberfaced Atkinson's Mr. Bean character finds disaster-magnet hero working as a guard in London's National Gallery. When a famous painting is purchased by a museum in L.A., the Gal lery's curators jump at the chance to send Bean along with the painting as an “expert,” although he is nearly mute and definitely not qualified. David (MacNicol), the American curator, invites him to stay at his house, much to the dismay of his wife and children. Bean, of course, wrecks the painting, ruins David's marriage and career, and generally makes an ass out of himself. He then resourcefully (and sometimes accidentally) puts things right. Atkinson proves himself a master of the almost lost art of slapstick comedy. 92m/C VHS, DVD . GB Rowan Atkinson, Peter MacNichol, Pamela Reed, Harris Yulin, Burt Reynolds, Larry Drake, Johnny Galecki, Richard Gant, Tom McGowan, Dakin Matthews, Peter Capaldi, Sandra Oh, Tricia Vessey, Peter Egan; D: Mel Smith; W: Richard Curtis, Robin Driscoll; C: Francis Kenny; M: Howard Goodall.