Healthy eating? It's not rocket science

Start with beans--and a bunch of recipes

Controlled burn: The annual pre-Christmas bonfire at Lincolnville Beach

Thoughts and prayers are all well and good but they have little effect on wild fires. If you’re concerned about the disaster in California (and if you’re not, you should be!), here’s one way to offer meaningful help: Donate to World Central Kitchen, the amazing outfit organized by the equally amazing Chef Jose Andres. WCK steps in wherever & whenever disaster strikes-—Los Angeles, Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, North Carolina, just to name a few calamitous areas—-providing food and support for victims and rescuers alike. You can donate here: https://wck.org—-and, if you wish you can target your donation to California. Or just give in general to sustain the work of this Nobel-worthy group. Or join me and many other supporters to make a regular monthly donation. Of course, it’s tax deductible too. 

Health Food?

Clearly the buzz is on. Suddenly, it seems, you can’t open a newspaper file or a healthy-diet website or a Facebook/Tiktok/Substack/Bluesky blog without running into it: UPF, Ultra-Processed Food, the latest entry on our nutritional enemies list. Currently, an astonishing two-thirds of the American diet is said to consist of highly processed foodstuffs (one hardly dares call it food).

But is this really news? Haven’t food writers and nutrition experts and dieticians known for years that those packaged snacks and processed drinks are almost always filled with ingredients that your granny wouldn’t recognize, and your great-granny would suspect, with good reason, are actually toxic?

Of course, it turns out many of those ingredients are indeed toxic and there is growing evidence to link their ubiquity to America’s food-related health problems, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease among them. Even the venerable New Yorker, not a place I usually turn to for dietary advice, has an article in a recent (January 6th) edition, “Still Processing: Why is the American diet so deadly?”, in which writer Dhruv Khullar discusses the issue and introduces us to some of the key academics advocating for more healthful diets—including Walter Willett, Marion Nestle, and Dariush Mozaffarian among others.

But haven’t we known all that for a very long time? Haven’t we heard regularly for the last quarter century (no! longer!) from the likes of Willett, Nestle, Mozaffarian, and their colleagues about the irrefutable links between good diets and good health outcomes? Haven’t we been securely in the loop at least since 2010 when Michael Pollen urged us all to “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants?”

However, knowing is not doing. Even with all the evidence, I should say the growing evidence, changing our diets, our ways of eating, is still a huge effort, more than many are inclined to undertake. You who are reading this—yes, you!—are already three steps ahead in this effort because you are at least interested in cooking. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.) And I hope I’m not mistaken when I assume that you cook at home, in your own kitchen, more than once a week. Cooking your own food, taking agency over your diet, is a critical first step to a healthier approach to eating.

With that in mind, let’s talk about charging up our diets. Let’s talk about eating something that is at one and the same time tasty, good for us, easy to prepare, and cheap. If you’ve made a resolution to eat more healthfully, if you’ve promised to spend 2025 exploring a more plant-based diet, if you’re newly dedicated to spending less and spending more wisely, do I have a proposal for you!

Eat Beans!

Zürsun, Baers Beans, and Rancho Gordo: Three excellent bean sources

That’s it. That’s all. The easiest modification you can make to your diet right now is to add more legumes. Specifically, because they’re on my mind, the particular variety of legume called Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. There is an entire corpus of other legumes to be explored, including lentils, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, and fava/broad beans, but right now, sitting on the kitchen porch, let’s focus on this very common and all too often despised stalwart of the store cupboard, P. vulgaris. Whether cannelloni or borlotti or black turtle beans or Greek gigantes or cranberry, kidney, great northern, yellow eye, soldier, or any other of the dozens and dozens of cultivars from all over the world, all derive their DNA ultimately from a New World bean that did not exist outside the Americas until sometime after 1492.

That’s right. Along with corn, potatoes, and tomatoes, dietary staples throughout the Americas, common beans were uncommon in the rest of the world. But wherever they appeared post-1492, they were quickly adopted. (Tomatoes and potatoes, on the other hand, were regarded skeptically for several centuries before they became familiar.) Food historians surmise that’s because legumes were already familiar ingredients in fields and kitchens around the world. Farmers knew how to grow them, cooks knew how to prepare them, and diners knew what a great addition legumes make to the table. Ecco: Phaseolus vulgaris entered the canon. Today, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, these beans are the most important edible legume in the world.

So why is it so difficult to get Americans to adopt them, to make beans part of a regular rotation, appearing on lunch, dinner, and, yes, even breakfast tables at least two or three times a week? Could it be that familiarity breeds contempt? Or quite possibly that we just don’t know how to cook beans into a tasty meal, by adding aromatics and herbs and a touch of acid--onions and garlic of course, chili peppers, a touch of cumin, fennel, or Lebanese za’atar, a little piece of cinnamon, a couple of allspice berries, not to mention all-important salt, plus sage, thyme, bay leaves, rosemary. And tomatoes, vinegar, or a splash of lemon. In this, as in so many kitchen tricks, Mediterranean cooks have a lot to teach us.

What about canned beans?

I may be in a minority but I’m not a fan of canned beans of any kind. Sure, it’s probably a good idea to keep a few cans on the pantry shelf next to the dried beans just for the emergency that never seems to arise until two years past the use-by date when that can really must be tossed.

I’m against canned beans for one simple reason: They don’t have the texture or the flavor of the beans you make yourself, starting from scratch with best quality dried beans. To my palate, they have an unpleasantly metallic taste. Besides, cooking beans is such an easy, straightforward task; the only “technique” involved is keeping an eye on the liquid level in the bean pot. Surely the most novice chef can handle that.

Which beans should I buy?

I may be struck down by the Kitchen Goddess for saying this but in my experience, most of the time most Phaseolus vulgaris cultivars are quite interchangeable. Mainers will say you have to have yellow eye or soldier beans for proper baked beans, Greeks claim only their very large gigantes will do for their bean dishes, food snobs will insist on Tarbais beans, exclusive to southern France, for a genuine cassoulet, and Mexican cooks say only Mexican black beans should go into a dish of black beans and rice. But, y’know, you can substitute and still have a perfectly delicious dish, if not perfectly authentic. And have we not learned over the years that authenticity is a will o’the wisp, always just beyond our grasp?

To soak or not to soak?

Modern, fresh-harvest dried beans (meaning the beans are less than two years old) should need no overnight soaking or any kind of softening treatment prior to cooking. The beans should be tender after simmering steadily for 30 or 40 minutes, max, whether in broth or plain water. (Scroll down for recipes.) The problem, however, is that it’s often impossible to gauge the age of dried beans, which is why I advocate for buying from a reliable source. I eschew supermarket shelves of unreliably dated beans and instead buy either directly from the farmer who grew, harvested, and dried them, or from an online purveyor such as Rancho Gordo in California, Zürsun in Idaho, or Baer’s Best in New England. Prices are higher but the quality is so much greater that it’s worth it. All of these guarantee that their beans are fresh from a current harvest—and all of them stand by the product so if you happen to come up against beans that are not premium, you will be dealt with accordingly.

I’m sure there are other sources for good quality beans but these are the three that I know, with whom I’ve had good experiences. Prices are similar from all three (around $6 to $8 a pound, depending on the cultivar), although the range of varieties may be different, with Rancho Gordo boasting the broadest selection. Nonetheless, if what you’re looking for are standard cultivars, cannellini, cranberry beans, black beans, and the like, you’ll find plenty to choose from. Which of these is the best choice? I go with the one closest to home—in my case that’s Baer’s Best—solely because the supply chain is shorter. If I lived on the West Coast, I’d buy from Rancho Gordo and if in the Midwest from Zürsun.

Why are beans so good for us?

That question is not hard to answer. Beans are a great source of protein and anyone (everyone?) who is trying, for various reasons, to cut down on meat consumption, would do well to add beans to their diet. Moreover, beans are rich in both soluble and insoluble fiber, fiber being an element singularly lacking in American diets. Fiber helps keep cholesterol balances optimal, while the potassium in beans promotes good blood pressure levels. All of which makes beans an excellent choice to maintain a healthy, working heart.

There is, of course, the flatulence problem, as it is politely called. Beans do make us fart, which might actually be a Good Thing in and of itself. Their high fiber content is hard for some to digest and may leave you feeling bloated, especially if you’re new to bean-eating. In that case, you’d do well to start with small servings and work up gradually to where you can comfortably include beans in your diet at least three times a week. Your digestive system will adjust and your cardiac system will thank you.

What to do with cooked beans?

Beans are one of the most versatile of ingredients and because of that, whenever I cook beans, I make a double quantity and keep the excess, refrigerated or frozen, ready for a quick meal or to add to a soup or salad. Beans combine nicely with other ingredients, from meat or fish (quickly seared shrimp or scallops atop a plate of beans?) to vegetables (greens ‘n’ beans is classic, squashes will add bright color and flavor) to carbs (beans and rice of course, or beans and farro, beans and bulgur, beans with pasta—pasta fazool).

Seared garlicky shrimp (gambas al ajillo) atop beans & greens

Adding cooked beans to a salad will boost the protein to main-course levels; or beans can redefine the whole purpose of a salad, a main plate of beans dressed with good oil and spicy vinegar, with chips of red onion, cucumber slices, slivers of sweet red peppers and fresh green celery all providing crunch to offset the tender beans. Similarly, cooked beans can be added to just about any soup, whether meat-based or vegetarian, or they can star as the main ingredient in a traditional Tuscan zuppa di fagioli or Greek fassolatha, served with a dollop of fresh new oil.

Beans for breakfast? I mentioned that above but it’s true, when I was in a New England boarding school a good many years ago, we were served classic Maine baked beans for supper Saturday night and those same beans appeared, warmed over and served with crisp, buttery-crusted popovers for Sunday breakfast. Was that heaven on a plate? Darned close!