For a while I ate beans as an act of defiance. I ate beans of anger for our factory farms. I ate beans of grief for our lost wildlife. I ate beans of contempt for our sick and frenzied culture. Beans were my middle finger, my act of contrition, my turning away.
I was put on the path of bean eating by the example of noble bean eaters. Diogenes was heckled for his life of voluntary poverty with the words, "If you'd only learn to flatter the king, you wouldn't have to live on lentils." But he replied, "If you'd only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter the king."
Democracy and free markets can also tyrannize. They can demand just as much in tribute from our integrity. In Thoreau's time, many Americans cried out against the injustice of slavery and the wars of expansion that would spread it into the west. But it is hard to cut loose from the system that feeds and clothes you. And people are compelled to finance wars.
In the midst of this, Thoreau cultivated beans near the shore of Walden pond. For his first year he hired a team to plow two acres. The next year he spaded up just a third of an acre by himself, finding from experience how little land and how much leisure he required.
His goal was not to see if he could live by subsistence farming and fishing, nor was it to disengage from society and the market. Like Diogenes, Thoreau made his life a public demonstration of the radical potential of simplicity. What might our lives look like if we disregarded society's view of what is respectable and necessary and worked to meet our basic needs directly?
Thoreau believed that practical philosophy and conscience would guide us to what is truly respectable and truly necessary. Two American beliefs that badly needed revision, even in his time, were the respectability of hard work and the necessity of accumulating too many things. We destroy the environment, exploit one another, and work ourselves sick in the attempt to improve our lives. The saying that America is a land of opportunity is hollow when that opportunity amounts to exchanging most of our lives and moral agency for a pile of consumer goods. On this note, Thoreau says
[in America] you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.
God how I wish that Americans had adopted this more noble and enlightened American dream. Or that any awareness of it could break through this nightmare of fascism and suicidal consumerism we find ourselves in today. What we really desire is to have the experiences and psychological goods that are acted out in the ad for Coca-Cola. What we really need is the assurance that our wellbeing, dignity, and worth are not contingent on our usefulness to some corporation or on our belonging to a privileged group. When we realize that on a mass scale, it will be the beginning of a new age.
I cling to a hope that rests on this fact: cultures change. Slavery, genocide, and wars of expansion were the norm for millennia. They were authorized by scripture and governments and economic systems to the point where a world without them seemed unimaginable. Now, a world with them seems intolerable and we protest the instances that still occur.
What are we indifferent to today that will, in time, be viewed as intolerable cruelties and insanities? The premise of the question implies that we cannot entirely know, but some things are now impossible to ignore:
This list is limited to issues around food production, because, you know, this is an essay about beans. It doesn't mention climate change but switching at least half of the world's population to a plant-based diet tops project drawdown's menu of climate interventions. No, it's not the singular solution to this crisis, but it's the emergency brake lever we could pull immediately to drastically curb emissions over the next 25 years.
Project Drawdown - Climate Solutions
Beans will be the key ingredient in our culture's redemption and our world's regeneration. That's absurd, but the truth sounds absurd when it has been surrounded by lies. "Just eat beans" is a solution that doesn't fit with the way we've been conditioned to think. Surely the answer to all of the issues above needs to take the form of a technological breakthrough. Surely the power to make progress lies solely in the hands of altruistic billionaire visionaries. Surely the effort will be massive, the logistics intractably complex.
No. Not at all. New technology, capital, and complex supply chains are the inputs to the current system of animal agriculture. We don't need to create anything new or wait for investors or organizations for us to make the decision, one by one, to begin eating beans instead. Cultivating, harvesting, and processing beans uses minimal inputs in comparison and is almost entirely automated using decades-old technology. And we already have many times the amount of farmland that we require to feed the world -- 75% of all soybeans are grown to feed livestock while only 7% go to feed humans (biofuel accounts for almost all the rest). The beans we need exist today.
How fortunate and how frustrating that the only hinderance to solving so many moral and environmental issues is human perception. Ultimately, for the change in our habits to be lasting, it can't be motivated by defiance or anger or grief or contempt. We have to learn to eat the beans of contentment.
I think I had some the other day. They were beautiful Anasazi beans, marbled purple and white. I soaked them overnight in salted water, rinsed them well, and gently simmered them in vegetable stock all day in my crockpot -- probably for nine hours. They lost their beautiful coloration and ended up resembling humble pinto beans. But they were luxuriously tender and creamy. I seasoned them with salt and served them with rice and green chiles. The dish was earthy and delicious and filling -- fit for a king.
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