Europe had beans for millennia before the ones most people eat today
The word bean was in West Germanic speech before the 12th century, naming broad beans and chickpeas. Then the Columbian exchange delivered Phaseolus, the American genus behind most beans eaten now, and the old word stretched to cover them. It later spread to coffee and vanilla, which are not legumes at all.
Botanically, a bean is the seed of one of many legume genera, eaten fresh or dried as a pulse. Like other legumes the plants fix nitrogen, which gives their seeds high protein. Cultivation is ancient: an early form was grown in Thailand from the early seventh millennium BCE, before pottery existed there. Beans were placed with the dead in ancient Egypt, large-seeded broad beans reached the Aegean, Iberia and lands beyond the Alps in the second millennium BCE, and the Iliad mentions beans and chickpeas tossed on a threshing floor.
Africa and the Americas domesticated their own. Cowpeas, including black-eyed peas, were tamed in sub-Saharan Africa in the second millennium BCE. The common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, now the world's most eaten species, was tamed roughly 8,000 years ago in three areas: Mexico, Central America and the southern Andes; genetic work suggests it arose in Mesoamerica and moved south. The oldest domesticated American beans come from Guitarrero Cave in Peru. Pre-Columbian farmers as far north as the Atlantic seaboard grew them with maize and squash in the Three Sisters system, and Christopher Columbus was the first European to see them growing.
In the kitchen, dried beans are usually soaked and boiled for soups, salads and stews such as chili con carne. Some kinds are turned into tofu or fermented into tempeh, and immature pods are eaten as green beans or edamame. Caution matters: many fully ripe beans contain toxins such as phytohaemagglutinin and must be cooked, and indigestible sugars in many species cause flatulence. Long regarded as a food of the poor, beans are now grown by the millions of tonnes, with India the largest producer.
Modern breeding narrows diversity by favouring a few high-yield varieties, so countries are conserving older seed. As of 2023, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault held more than 40,000 samples of Phaseolus.
Source: Bean
