The easiest way to become vegan is to watch a video of factory farms abusing and slaughtering animals.

I started this a coupla years ago. Not every night but often. Great recipes on YouTube! And I do black bean burritos with the wraps regularly. Tasty and cheap.

It is to die for! She has leftovers with poached egg for breakfast.

Because is looks a bit Arizona style 'wintry' today here, I made a pot of stewed lentils with cumin, ginger, garlic, onion, turmeric, and a bit of red chili flakes. Perfect with some plain low fat yogurt stirred in. I generally serve with some brown rice for supper meals.

Love a side of lentils with a spinach dish called saag aloo too.

Hummus is a real help in summer here. Nourishing and tasty, but not too heavy. I make bigger batches, divide it up and freeze. Good to have on hand and fun to experiment with different seasonings and/or additions.

People who may have some digestive issues with legumes often find the issues go away as their bodies get used to the food. Also, Bean-O helps provide enzymes to get one's digestive track more able to process legumes. After a while, no problems.

I saw a Greek pasta dish online that was amazing. I should've bookmarked it. Maybe it was TT. I just deleted that app today. Oh well, c'est la vie. I'll find it a year from now

I'm not vegan, but a vegan friend suggested pea protein and It's great. Over 65ers are supposed to eat 40% more protein a day than 18 to 50 year olds and more than that if your very active, and I am. It's made a big difference in my life Ie strength, stamina, muscle mass, weight etc. I feel like I'm on the way to being, if not vegan, then at least vegetarian. I eat very little meat anymore.

Beans? Nope.

cause me to have excruciating pain to the point of making me sick to my stomach. I wish I could eat them because I really liked them. Yogurt does the same thing. None of those over the counter pills you can take to relieve the problems they create don’t work for me.

are even cheaper. We make beans almost daily, even for the carnivores in the house.

After the deportations and tariffs, we won't be able to afford meat so might as well get used to cooking beans now.

It's very hard to get to 25 grams of dietary fiber daily.

Lentils? Is this a new food torture plan by the Dietitians?

Indians have a large range of methods for preparing lentils and other kinds of dal - you're no longer limited to the earnest lentil stews of the hippie era.

If I could figure out how to make the NYT gift link work, I'd share a gateway recipe for red lentil soup that may convert even the staunchest legume-phobe

My favorite legume. Not much of a bean person at all.

Now I don't mind humus, but then it's made with oil.
Same with refried beans...

Beans, lentils, every kind. They give me such pain in my stomach that I've laid off them completely. Nothing helps. I have to stay away from dairy as well. So no cheese. We eat mainly fish, farm-fresh eggs, and turkey for protein. We do not eat junk food or drink soda or the local favorite sweet tea.

We're both nearing 70 and no cardiovascular disease, no diabetes, coming from families that had both. We have clear arteries, low cholesterol, etc. Exercise plays a key role as well as diet. I exercise every day, without fail, even on colonoscopy days, after knee replacements, etc.

If I did well on beans and lentils, I'd be eating them all the time. But they've given me enough pain to last a lifetime. I can almost tolerate a small amount of black beans in turkey chili, but even that is iffy.

I would not touch lentils - often desiccated with glyphosate and even organic has glyphosate- just lower levels. US gov doesn’t really check for glyphosate in our food.

“A weed killer that's been linked to cancer was found in six types of hummus. Here's what you need to know.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/weed-killer-linked-to-cancer-found-in-hummus-ewg-report-2020-7?op=1

I like organic black beans refried in beef tallow with eggs or meat - not alone.

Grass fed/grass finished beef is a clean food if cows graze on uncontaminated land. You would have to eat lots of lentils and beans to get similar protein and some aminos you need are not in grains and beans.

I live in ranch country and buy my grass fed/finished beef from a woman in my book club whose ranch is 15 minutes from my place. Just got an order and my freezer is full. No pesticides, hormones, GMO fed cattle - very clean meat. I can actually see the cows before they are slaughtered.

Carbs are cheap. It's what the majority of processed foods provide or add to foods.

No thank you. I don't want more carbs in my diet. Yes these beans and lentils have some vegetable proteins but why not add eggplants, nuts and nutritional
yeast to that list? And eggs, low calorie and very few carbs with the protein.

Those items listed above have far less carbs then beans and lentils....(unless you are talking black soy beans. But keep the sugar out of the black soy beans or you are just back to the same excess carb problem.)

No thanks. I'll take my proteins without such large quantities of carbs with it.

Carbs are so much easier to grow, process and feed to masses of people. It was the basic staple for feudal societies, workhouses, Irish famine victims, serfs and peasants. Throw in lots and lots of potatoes and it's cheap to hand out to a population growing poorer and poorer.

I know they give some people digestive trouble, but they agree with my system and I have wonderful, flavorful recipes with lots of variety

It was about a vegetarian diet. In it she talked about combining proteins to get all the amino acids... for example beans have some, but not all of the amino acids, and rice has some other amino acids that beans don't, so eaten together you get a "complete protein".

I had this book (I think back in the late 70s). I've been vegetarian since the 70s. There wasn't a lot of information for vegetarian... never mind vegan, diets back then. It still amazes me how veganism has exploded around the world now.

Nice to see the U.S. dietary guidelines adding these additional sources of proteins..... better late than never. This kind of info has been around for decades...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet

In the Future, Everything Will Be Made of Chickpeas

America is finally embracing an ingredient that much of the world has relied on for millennia.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/in-the-future-everything-will-be-made-of-chickpeas



The Atlantic



In 2007, Poorvi Patodia was pregnant and felt like she was eating too many chips. Her cravings for salty, crunchy snacks were intense, but what moms should eat while pregnant is a touchy subject. “I had this thought of, What else could I be eating that’s better for me?” she says. “I remembered these roasted chickpeas that my mom used to make.”

Patodia started roasting chickpeas for herself. She had her baby and went on with her life, but the thought stuck with her. Her fellow Americans were missing out on something delicious.

Five years later, Patodia put her pregnancy cravings, Indian background, and professional experience in the food industry together and started Biena Snacks, which offers more than a dozen varieties of crunchy, flavored chickpeas. It was the right thing at the right time, even in a country that has long ignored the ingredient: The snacks are now available in more than 12,000 retail locations.

Biena is part of a constellation of American food companies, including Banza and The Good Bean, that has sprung up around the humble chickpea in recent years, ready to fully integrate a global staple food into the country’s diets. Now there are chips made with chickpea flour and vegan butter emulsified with the liquid waste of hummus manufacturing. There’s dessert hummus, which might be one of the more difficult sells in the garbanzo-food family tree. Beyond the grocery store, there are viral chickpea recipes to prepare at home, and maybe even some chickpea brine behind the bar at your favorite cocktail spot. (The substance, commonly called aquafaba, can be used to create a fizz without the threat of salmonella borne by a raw egg white.)

Trendy ingredients with health-centric pitches can be easy to dismiss as the domain of affluent coast dwellers overestimating the importance of their own preferences. But the spike in chickpea interest in the United States has been so profound that it’s even reflected in internet-search data: Monthly Google inquiries have more than tripled since January 2011, when hummus was already commonplace among the country’s more adventurous eaters. In a country increasingly wary of meat, more open than ever to non-Western ingredients, and anxious about climate change, the chickpea’s expanding role in the American diet is less a trend story than a logical inevitability.

First, there was hummus, the Trojan horse on which the chickpea rode into the American diet. “Hummus was one of the first prestige grocery foods,” says Ali Bouzari, a food scientist and culinary consultant who helps companies develop new food products. “Hummus was The Sopranos of the grocery store.” Because of new manufacturing and packaging technologies that had become available around the time of hummus’s 2000s-era ascent, Bouzari says, food companies were able to deliver a fresher, better-tasting product to consumers than the first time snack brands had tried their hand at bean dips—which is essentially what hummus is—in the 1970s.

Hummus’s American expansion was led by the Israeli company Sabra, which was so successful that PepsiCo bought a 50 percent ownership stake in it in 2008. But the involvement of giant food conglomerates is an indication of hummus’s success, not the cause of it, Bouzari says. “They could not just cram it down our throats if we weren’t going to buy it,” he explains.

The era’s growing stable of health-conscious consumers wanted something to dip their carrots in besides fat-free ranch dressing. Hummus provided a snack that wasn’t predicated on engineering the good parts out of something they liked, and it benefited from an American populace more open-minded about new foods than it ever had been. It appeared in grocery stores at a time when Americans had already started acclimating en masse to things such as sushi, which had been considered intolerably foreign by most Americans for decades. Comparatively, hummus was a small leap.

“It boils down to the fact that people like creamy, starchy stuff,” Bouzari says. “And at this point, the American learning curve for new foods is just insanely short.” He attributes that shift to the internet and travel creating a sense of broad familiarity to more types of food, but also to some fundamental differences in who gets to make decisions in the American food industry. People like him and Patodia, who grew up with immigrant parents and had food experiences that deviated from the long-held white American norm, have more power to shape what ends up in grocery stores, as both consumers and industry professionals.

Once hummus became a widely enjoyed grocery-store staple, people at every level of the American food industry saw opportunity in the legume’s versatility. In the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, chickpeas have been a common ingredient in everyday cooking for thousands of years. “The reason chickpea is grown and consumed so heavily in those areas is because of its nutritional value,” says Douglas Cook, the head of the chickpea lab at the University of California at Davis. “It’s an import species, and we’re a bit late to the party.”

One of the chickpea’s biggest sells to modern American consumers is its protein and fiber content. Like Greek yogurt, another familiar but foreign food that took off at roughly the same time, the chickpea’s high protein—15 grams a cup when cooked—is seen as evidence of its superior food value in a diet culture obsessed with protein. Indeed, Patodia says that one of Biena’s two biggest consumer demographics isn’t characterized by a particular location or income level, but by a common goal. “They’re struggling or aspiring to eat healthier but have a hard time with it,” she says. “It’s the original problem I was trying to solve for myself.”

For those with food allergies or dietary restrictions, meanwhile, chickpeas are a utility player. They tend to trigger fewer reactions than wheat or soy while furnishing a similar stable of flours, extracts, and nonanimal protein sources. Plus, twice as many Americans believe they have food allergies as actually do, so an ingredient’s status as allergy-friendly can propel it to popularity beyond just those with diagnosable problems. Bouzari sees this as a big motivator for his clients that are developing new products. “Chickpea is one of the five or 10 ingredients that, universally, everyone is okay with putting in their stuff,” he says.

For vegetarians, vegans, or omnivores who want to eat less meat, the bean is handy and transmutable. “It’s available across cuisines, so it’s a pretty easy thing to adapt to people’s diets,” says Alicia Kennedy, a vegan food writer and the host of the Meatless podcast. “It takes on so many flavors on its own, so it’s kind of the chicken of the bean world.” Chickpeas are common in Indian, Turkish, Ethiopian, Middle Eastern, Greek, Italian, and Spanish food, just to name a few, so they’re an easy starting point for American cooks. “Chickpeas just aren’t an intimidating bean,” Kennedy says.

The number of Americans who eschew meat or animal products altogether has held roughly steady in recent decades, but the amount of meat eaten by Americans overall has declined: From 2005 to 2014, red-meat consumption in America dropped by almost one-fifth. The concerns about health and the environment that drove that drop have only intensified in the five years since. Chickpeas are inexpensive and broadly available, and the global cuisines they commonly appear in are ones that de-emphasize meat in ways that Americans are starting to see as more valuable. People in the United States aren’t trying anything new. Instead, they’re regressing to the global mean after generations of profligate meat consumption that many now consider unwise.

In the maybe-not-so-distant future, getting closer to that mean might be more necessity than choice. In a climate that’s getting hotter and drier for many Americans, sustainable and nutritionally dense crops such as chickpeas will likely play an important role in feeding people, as exactly what America can cultivate changes. Chickpeas haven’t dominated global diets for millennia by coincidence, according to UC Davis’s Cook. “Chickpea is very efficient in terms of water use, and in most of the world, it’s grown as a rain-fed crop,” he says. It also enriches the ground it grows in: Chickpeas, like other legumes, release nitrogen into the soil. Cook says that reduces the need for one of the most expensive and environmentally damaging elements of industrial food cultivation: fertilizer made by burning fossil fuels. .................................