Beans Are a Vegetable: an Overanalysis

“Of course beans count as a vegetable!” I said to my wife. We have this house rule that it’s okay to eat mac and cheese for dinner so long as you add a vegetable. If I may ‘spill the beans’, I’m obsessed with them. Each one is tastier than the last: garbanzo bean, black bean, kidney. The butter bean, which is just lima beans with a new identity. I’ll often eat black beans as a meal. When my then-fiance had her bachelorette party they played a kind of Newlywed game where she was asked to name my favorite food. She said without hesitation, “BEANS!”

“Beans?” her friends asked. “What do you mean beans? Like baked beans? Refried beans?”

“Literally just beans.”

So I was shocked when she said beans don’t count as eating your vegetables. Determined to defend my favorite food, I dug deep to learn what is and isn’t a vegetable. What I found is that it’s complicated but TL;DR you're darn tootin’ they’re veggies.

“Beans aren’t a vegetable; they’re a legume,” they say. That is our first step of the pedantic journey ahead. Legumes are the common name of the family Fabaceae which includes peanuts, peas, green beans, clovers, and lupines. What do you notice about that list? What I see are a nut, two vegetables, a weed, and a garden flower. However the peanut is not actually a nut. So why does it come in the can of mixed nuts? Clover is an interesting case too. I grow crimson clover as flowers and as cover crops. Clover used to be a natural part of lawns until the 1950’s when it became fashionable to have all grass instead. Nut, weed, vegetable: these words aren’t set in stone fruit, they’re colloquial and they change all the time.

“Beans aren’t a vegetable; they’re a protein,” they say. Is the implication that their protein content puts them in the meats group? For sure, beans are very high in protein. That’s part of their magic! Loaded with fiber, rich in nutrients, and they even have complete protein. Amazing! There’s this new trend where the food trucks will ask you to “pick your protein.” Usually the choices will be like beef, chicken, or tofu which is made from soybeans. High protein content does not make beans a meat though. Kale is high in protein too, and if anybody is eating it they’re not grouping it in the “protein/ meat” category. Avocados are high in protein and they’re a vegetable. Or are they a fruit?

It would help us here to make a quick detour into basic botany. A fruit in the botanical sense is the ovary of a flowering plant that contains seeds. However fruit has another definition which is culinary and more limited. Fruit (botanical) includes zucchini, tomato, and almond. But as the saying goes “knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad”. This is another root of semantic confusion. Some words for plants are botanical, some are culinary. Fabaceae is strictly a botanical word. Nut and fruit are both culinary and botanical. Vegetable is strictly culinary. That’s right. There is no botanical definition of vegetable, except as a distinction from animal life or mineral substances. Oxford English Dictionary lays out this culinary definition: “a plant or part of a plant used as food such as cabbage, potato, carrot, or bean.” Did you catch that? Right after the Oxford comma was the bean. For an essay about how beans are vegetables I could end it right here with a mic drop. But I can sense you rolling your eyes. You’re not convinced the scholars at Oxford English Dictionary can decide for us what is and isn’t a vegetable. The Food Pyramid still has its claws in us even today.

When the USDA first erected the Food Pyramid in 1992 beans were grouped with meat, eggs and nuts (2-3 servings recommended daily). They were one level up from the separate vegetable group. This seems to be the source of the idea that beans are not vegetables but legumes and part of the protein/ meat group. The USDA based the Food Pyramid on a similar Swedish model, replacing previous suggestions like the Food Wheel and the Basic 7. Beans have been recategorized through these guides over the years until most recently in 2011 when Michelle Obama teamed up with the USDA to put MyPlate on our tables. Now beans are rightly grouped where they belong, with the vegetables.

These shifting goalposts are why I’m not entirely convinced with Oxford’s definition either. It says that any part of the plant which is eaten is a vegetable. That includes nectarines, pistachios, even cinnamon! We usually define vegetables on our own using our colloquial culinary sensibilities. When we refer to vegetables as distinct from fruits (culinary), we mean plant parts that are nutritious and low in sugar with some exceptions. Beets are high in sugar but they don’t go in the fruit salad. Vegetables can be leaves like spinach or stalks like asparagus. They can be seeds like peas, or whole pods like green beans. They can be fruit (botanical) like squash or even roots. Vegetables can include members of the family Brassicaceae (cabbage), Cucurbitaceae (cucumber), Amaranthaceae (chard) and more. As we’ve said, legume is the common name for the family Fabaceae (beans!).

While all vegetables belong to a family, not all members of those families are vegetables. Watermelons belong to Cucurbitaceae. Sweet peas belong to Fabaceae but are not edible. The idea that legumes are not vegetables doesn’t ‘grow corn.’ Peas, green beans, and dried beans are. Clovers, peanuts, and lupines are not. By the way, green beans are unripened beans eaten with the pod or shell. We used to call them string beans but modern hybrids have done away with the string that grew in the shell.

Let’s get some pinto beans on our plate and take a closer look. When I want a healthy vegetable, I want something high in fiber and nutrients, but low in fat and sugar. Pintos are higher in Vitamin C than carrots and spinach. They absolutely dominate broccoli with dietary fiber, calcium, protein, and iron. They’re low fat and low sugar. Pinto beans have all the advantages of other vegetables and more. They make lettuce look like styrofoam. Beans are the original superfood. YUM! Why wouldn’t you want that nutrient-packed taste sensation proudly on your plate in the vegetable section? We don’t use the Food Pyramid anymore so let’s put its outdated ideas in the compost bin once and for all. The dictionary and the US government say beans are vegetables and now we can see for ourselves the reasons why.

Black beans are my go-to. Heat up a can with the juice, add onion and cumin, and scoop ‘em up with chips. Eat pinto beans! No recipe needed, they're delightful just the way they are. Hummus is a great snack made from garbanzo beans. Then there’s the mother of all beans. The biggest and the baddest: the butter bean! They melt in your mouth. Saute them with some spices, maybe add cream sauce or even cheese. Perfection! Grow beans yourself! You won’t find an easier plant to grow. Get the kids interested in gardening. They even add nitrogen to your soil. They’re literally fertilizing the soil as they grow. Cook the pods whole as green beans. Can’t beat that! We truly don’t deserve beans. The ‘musical fruits’ are a blessing on this Earth. Holy Frijole!

References

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legume

2 https://smokymountainnews.com/lifestyle/rumble/item/31055-a-history-of-the-food-pyramid

3 https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/175199/nutrients

4 https://news.wttw.com/2021/05/01/clover-lawns-went-mainstream-maligned-now-they-re-making-comeback

5 https://www.southernexposure.com/the-major-plant-families-in-a-vegetable-garden/

6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beans%2C_Beans%2C_the_Musical_Fruit