When: July 3
Eat Beans Day on July 3rd is a celebration of one of the most nutritionally complete and culturally universal foods on earth. Beans have been cultivated on every inhabited continent for thousands of years, feeding civilizations when other crops failed. High in protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates, they're also one of the most sustainable foods you can eat.
Beans fed the Roman legions, sustained the Aztec empire, and likely prevented the collapse of early American colonies — they're arguably history's most important food.
Roman gladiators were not the meat-eating warriors that movies imagine. Bone and hair isotope analyses of gladiator remains, published by researchers at the University of Ephesus in 2014, found that their diet was primarily grain and legumes — barley, beans, lentils. The protein was plant protein. Their bodies were built for repeated performance over many fights, and the bean-heavy diet gave them the endurance and recovery that a meat-centric diet couldn't sustain. They were called "hordearii" — barley men. The spectators who watched them probably ate better. Beans have been at the foundation of most civilizations. Fava beans were cultivated in the Middle East around 6000 BCE. In Mesoamerica, common beans and black beans were domesticated roughly 8,000 years ago — independently from Old World legumes, through the same agricultural intuition operating on different continents. The Three Sisters planting system — corn, beans, and squash grown together — was the nutritional and...