Broad beans have fed farmers for over ten thousand years
Charred beans from three Neolithic villages in Lower Galilee, dated by radiocarbon, suggest farmers were growing broad beans as early as 8250 BCE. Nobody has found the plant's wild ancestor, yet the crop still thrives from Sichuan to Cairo, where slow-cooked beans with oil and cumin make a national breakfast.
Vicia faba is a stiff, upright vetch that grows 0.5 to 1.8 metres tall on square stems. Unlike most of its climbing relatives it has no tendrils. Its sweet-scented white flowers carry a spot of genuine black on the wing petals, and a crimson-flowered form was recently rescued from extinction. Wild pods are 5 to 10 centimetres long, but food varieties reach 25, with flattened seeds up to 25 millimetres long. The genome is enormous, about 13 gigabases, swollen by repeated copies of mobile DNA, and it is predicted to hold 34,221 protein-coding genes.
Farmers like it for toughness. It survives cold, grows in salty or clay soil where most legumes fail, and fixes nitrogen, so it serves as a winter cover crop against erosion. Large-seeded kinds are called broad beans in Commonwealth countries and fava beans in the United States; small, hard field or horse beans feed livestock, though some cooks prefer their stronger flavour. Chocolate spot fungus and black bean aphids are its chief enemies.
As food it is dense: raw mature beans are about 26 percent protein, with the highest protein-to-carbohydrate ratio among the common pulses such as chickpeas and lentils. People with an inherited enzyme deficiency called G6PD deficiency can suffer a reaction known as favism after eating them, caused by a compound called vicine. Breeders found a low-vicine line in the 1980s and have bred it into several modern varieties.
Cuisines use it in many ways. Sichuan cooks ferment it with soybeans and chillies into doubanjiang. Ecuadorians in the Andes eat steamed habitas with cheese. Egyptians use it for falafel, while Levantine cooks use chickpeas, and mash it with oil, salt and cumin into ful medames.
Source: Vicia faba
