On the topic of beans and essential amino acids.

For a good part of this spring and now on into summer, I have been taking a hard look at beans. Not so much because I like them (I do), but more due to the fact that they are considered nearly a complete food and a good substitute for eating meat. By saying complete food, I mean that beans have most all of what are known as ‘essential amino acids’. These are the protein building units (there are twenty in all) that we all need to be healthy and strong. Given food, our bodies can synthesize twelve of the twenty with the last eight needing to be obtained from some outside source. These sources are most readily found in meat, fish, poultry, milk, cheese, and eggs. The eight amino acids, by the way, are phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, isoleucine, methionine, leucine, and lysine. Of these three are considered ‘limiting amino acids’ mainly because they hard to find in vegetables. These are methionine, tryptophan and lysine. (Only one legume, Soybean, has all eight essential amino acids). But who wants t eat it J

So, if for whatever reason, you want to abstain from ingesting animal products, you have to look to combinations of veggies that together will provide your body with what it needs. One such combo would be beans and rice! (Beans are only missing tryptophan and or methionine while rice lacks lysine). So, if you had to subsist on just two readily available foods that can be stored for long periods of time, are easy to grow and contribute a lot to your health, then the bean and rice combination is hard to beat. Just a half cup of each will provide about 200 calories, no sodium or cholesterol, plenty of good carbohydrates and loads of dietary fiber to help insure colon health.

My Great Northern Bean Experiment

Way earlier this season, I think it was sometime around February, I was eating a plate of beans when a thought struck me. I got to wondering about how these beans, which I buy by the bagful at the store, were grown. I wondered if Great Northern Beans were a bush bean or pole bean (for that matter are they a hybrid?). I wondered if I could eat them when the pods were young. Finally, I wondered about how productive such a plant would be. That is to say, how many dried beans could be harvested from an average mature plant and what other factors might inhibit or enhance said production So, that thought turned into an experiment of sorts for me to try this spring and summer.

Along about the middle of April, I planted 25 beans in a small two by two foot area in a raised bed I have out back. I was surprised when after just a few days, most of the beans germinated. In just two short months they went from small to mature and my first two questions were therefore answered. Beans fresh out of the bag do readily germinate and the resulting plant is of the bush variety. By mid June, Each plant was sporting approximately twenty five bean pods with about six little beans in each pod or about 150 dried beans per plant.

I harvested a few of these to cook up in boiling water after first de-stringing them and then cutting them up into small pieces. Once done, I added a little butter and some salt and pepper. They tasted marvelous. So question number three was answered in the affirmative.

Now, I have to wait for the remaining pods to fully mature after which I will carefully harvest the plants to get an idea of the average number of dried bans that can be had per plant. From this data, I can come up with some idea of how many would need to be planted to support a person if that was all they had to eat. I’ll also get an idea of how many new beans a single bean produces. I’ll write about that in a future blog and also plan to have a You Tube Video on this on the Danomanno Channel.