Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.

Marcelene Cox

National Eat Your Beans Day is a “live healthy” holiday observed every year on July 3rd. This day celebrates the bean vegetable in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Beans (legumes) date back to the early seventh millennium BCE, making them one of the longest-cultivated plants.

As they were seven millennia ago, today, beans are a significant source of protein. If you’re looking for complex carbohydrates, folate, fiber, and iron, eat some beans. They are excellent sources for each of those. A very healthy choice for any meal or snack, they are also an excellent source of fiber, low in fat and high in complex carbohydrates, folate, and iron.

• There are approximately 40,000 bean varieties in the world.
• Only a fraction of these varieties are mass-produced for regular consumption.

Let’s Snack!

That’s a lot of beans! How do we know which ones to choose? Snacking on chickpeas provides us with one of the best choices. Also known as garbanzo beans, these legumes pack a whopping 12.5 grams of fiber, 71 % of the recommended daily intake (RDI) of folate, 84% RDI of Manganese, and 26% RDI of Iron per serving in 1 cup. Add chickpeas to stews like you would any bean. However, they also roast nicely with your favorite herbs and spices for a delicious and healthy snack.

History of Eat Beans Day

Beans have been with us for a long time, a very long time in fact. How long we hear you ask? The earliest sign of cultivated beans was in the seventh millennium BC, a time so long ago that it predated one of the earliest human crafts, ceramics. That’s right, we’ve been eating beans since before we knew how to make a pot to cook them in! The Egyptians took a particular interest in them, and beans were often found buried with the dead. Beans were so important to human history they even got a mention in the Iliad.

Beans have many qualities that helped them take and hold their place as an important human staple. They’re an excellent source of fiber and protein with virtually no fat to be found and they provide calcium, folic acid, potassium, and iron, all vital to a healthy body. 40,000 varieties can be found throughout the world, though we only see a few of these made available to mass markets. Unlike most cultivated plants, beans have been near perfect from the beginning! The genes from our ancestor’s crops of beans are almost identical to those of the modern crop. Why mess with something when it’s already perfect?! You don’t! You just enjoy a big bowl every Eat Beans Day, and the rest of the year as well!