The Opinions - Can Learning to Love Beans Help Save the Planet?

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

In a nation filled with meat lovers, how can we persuade Americans to stop eating animals and help save the planet? The food writer Bee Wilson believes the answer lies with food preferences — specifically, changing them. “It is possible to learn to love new foods, and it’s something transformative and actually joyous,” she says. In this episode, she makes the case for changing your taste for beans, a humble legume that is packed with extraordinary flavor.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is B. Wilson. I'm a food writer and the author of eight books, including most recently The Secret of Cooking, recipes for an easier life in the kitchen. The consensus for a while now from climate scientists has been that the average human needs to learn to eat a whole lot, less meat than our current levels of consumption. We're not just talking about a few meatless Mondays. We're talking about a radical shift in how we eat. Taste is so often such a deep part of our identity that we make the mistake of thinking that taste is also destiny. But that isn't the case. Taste can change. Every single individual food preference that you have and that I have was learnt.

We learn it in families. We learn it in our culture. culture, but anything that's learnt can also be unlearned and re-learned. And there's a huge potential there. And I've seen it with my own eyes. I five years ago was involved in co-founding a food education charity in the UK called Taste Ed, short for Taste Education. And the essence of it is helping children to learn new tastes, especially for vegetables and fruits, but also legumes such as canned chickpeas. I work with a head teacher. here in the UK at school in Lincolnshire and he happened to manage to capture on film

the moment that a three-year-old girl took her very first taste of plum. Pop it in your mouth. And she went through the full gamut of human emotions. The first emotion was fear, which is what all of us feel, even as adults, when we're presented with something that is alien that we're considering putting into our mouse,

which is a very intimate gesture. And she had terror on her face. And then she said to her teacher, will it hurt me? It's not going to hurt you, darling. And she said it's all slippery. It is slippery, isn't it? It feels really slippery. And the teacher said, don't worry, you can try it if you want to.

You know, you can put it in your mouth. And then she did. Oh, well done. And then you could see she was still very alarmed, but suddenly something on her face shifted to curiosity. What does it feel like in your mouth there, Flo? Is it tasty? And you hear yourself chewing.

You hear it in your head. And all of a sudden, she just then did this massive thumbs-up gesture. And you saw her switch to joy. It is possible to learn to love new foods. And it's something transformative and actually joyous. And if any food were a perfect candidate for changing our preferences, it's beans. In terms of sustainability, beans are everything that meat is not. They're cheap, they're a very accessible form of protein,

they're a far less thirsty crop than the mass-produced meat of America. And in addition, not only do they not ruin the soil, as so much agribusiness does, they actually fix nitrogen into the soil. So they're kind of the ultimate virtuous food. But more than that, they can be delicious. So, yeah, the question is how do we make beans more desirable for people to try and eat? One of the first things I need to say is actually there are plenty of Americans already who do have a taste for beans.

So I think stage one would be let's celebrate the food cultures in America, Italian Americans, pasta fajoli. What's more delicious than that? Let's celebrate all of these versions of different American bean dishes. which are loved but maybe haven't had the amplification and the prominence in mainstream food culture that they deserve. Step two is if we're talking about beans in their most convenient form, which is canned or jarred, we could do a much better job of packaging it in a way that gets away from the stigma around beans. They're seen as a poverty food because beans are so much associated with food pantries. It's a company Rancho Gordo who sell dried beans that every time I

look at that website, it's like looking at jewels. There are pale green flagellade beans. There are dark, jet black caviar lentils. There are beautiful pink pinto beans. And you're just led to it through a kind of beauty. I love beans. And I know that not everyone agrees. Maybe you have traumatic childhood memory. of slimy limer beans. Maybe you just don't see chickpeas as something as appealing as chicken, but I'm here to tell you that you can learn to love beans

and doing so might be extremely beneficial for the planet as well as your own health. When the foods that you actually want to eat are the sustainable ones, then sustainable eating is something easy rather than punishing.

And I think an important truth that we sometimes have lost is that it's very rare for human beings to actually make a habit of eating foods they dislike. So pleasure in food, which we so often speak of as a problem, is actually part of the solution. Pleasure is what changes the world. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Veshaka, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger.

It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair,

Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Stressing. Thank you, sir.