Green beans lost their strings thanks to one New York breeder in 1894
Older cooks called them string beans for good reason: a tough fibre ran down every pod and had to be peeled away. In 1894 Calvin Keeney of Le Roy, New York, bred the first stringless variety, and today most green beans have none, though the old name stubbornly survives.
A green bean is simply the young, unripe pod of the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, eaten before the seeds inside mature. That sets it apart from beans grown for their dry seeds, and puts it in the same category as snow peas and sugar snaps. The plant comes from Central and South America, with evidence of cultivation in Mexico and Peru stretching back thousands of years. Young pods of runner beans, yardlong beans and hyacinth beans are cooked the same way.
Gardeners sort them by habit. Bush, or dwarf, beans stay under about 61 centimetres, need no supports and ripen their whole crop in a short burst, which suits machine harvesting and makes them the commercial favourite. Pole beans climb twisting vines up trellises and keep producing longer. Half-runners fall in between, with runners of one to three metres. More than 130 edible-pod varieties exist, with pods ranging from thin, round fillet types to broad, flat romano types. Some pods are purple and turn green in the pan, and yellow-podded ones are sold as wax beans.
Cooking matters for more than flavour. Raw green beans contain phytohaemagglutinin, a lectin that is toxic to people but broken down by high heat; poisoning symptoms usually start two to three hours after eating. Cooked, they are 90 percent water, with modest amounts of vitamins C and K. They are steamed, boiled, stir-fried, baked, pickled like cucumbers or folded into soups and stews. In the northern United States, green bean casserole, made with mushroom soup and crispy fried onions, is a Thanksgiving fixture.
The crop is enormous. World production in 2024 reached 26 million tonnes, and China grew 72 percent of it, with India a distant second. Across the world they go by many names: French beans, snap beans or simply snaps.
Source: Green bean
