ITT I will talk a bunch of shit on whatever you direct my attentions to

Beans.

I have, as of hitting "quote" on this post, have basically no shit to talk about beans. Lemme get on the world wide google and see what leglume and doom I can muster

Okay.

alright.... (I am seeing a fantastic opportunity for a pun here but it is ridiculously niche even for my go-to history buff friend (who is not buff but does not need to be for me to care about 'em a lot). Hey Sanzh if you're reading this, you're a cool dude and you better be preparing your ass for me to comprehensively roast it)

Ooh

Alright alright alright I think I can steer this pod to my comfort zone

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So here I fucking was, chillaxing on an island off the coast of this one continent called Asia (dunno if you guys have heard of it), ruminating upon Ye Bean and my western-ass cultural marinade I've been stewing in the last 25 years automatically directing my mind to a pigeonhole fool of fat flat green sons of bitches. Broad beans. Hanging on their vines like the ash at the cigarette tip of a hard-boiled detective; tresses with curls enough to strangle a trellis, ready to pop off the vine like a shady warehouse full of gangsters cutting deals as the c®ops circle outside. Coats the color of old money.

Btw Please for the love of god, if you're gonna boil beans do it hardly, as in, hardly do it. Don't. Do not. There's so many better ways to eat them. Heck eat better beans. Eat peas, they're technically beans. Eat soybeans. There are so many fun things to do with soybeans! They're good as a snack! They're great and more nutritious fermented! You westerners will ferment grain juice and drink that cuz acquiring potable water was beyond your ken for a couple hundred years there and you believed letting sky-fungus shit in your drink was what made it safe?

And, now, thanks to one Henry "Brave-New-World-Style-Praise-The-Ford" Ford, globally we use the bulk of soybean production on more energy-intensive protein????

Protein, I should note, is one of those things that to me seems to sit in the unexpected middle of a venn diagram of "Shit In My Knowlospheres" to the point it feels like a disservice that kids don't get taught this shit?

Proteins are what fuckin, everything, in your body is made up of that isn't calcium'n raw metals'n shit. (And proteins still play an active role in how your body handles those minerals.) They're like Pop beads meets origami; the exact order the amino acids (the beads in this metaphor) are linked up in in a given protein (and thus the physical-chemical limits on how the thing can/will bend) are dictated by the DNA sequence. It's really cool and basically when you're eating protein (from meat or fish or dairy or eggs or seeds) you're breaking those origami-chains back down to individual blocks, then making cool new shit out of those blocks from a bunch of billion-year old instruction manuals your parents gave to you! It's like etsy for your endoplasmic reticulum!!!!

Naturally, proteins and amino acids come from things that were alive at some point and were planning to use that shit before you tore them from their dirt-cradles/slit their throats. That, or they were stockpiling that shit for their offspring in the form of eggs, or weed eggs (also known as seeds, and incidentally-germ(inate)anely beans).

Having spent billions of years evolving to best-provision their offspring, and having not spent billions of years evolving for maximum displaced tree goblin digestibility, beans are chock full of protein but put that shit behind an enthalpic paywall so it's not easily digested without very specific enzymes that everyone assured us early in our evolutionary history (I'm talking the unicellular stages) we weren't going to need later, then they made their own fancy clubhouse by the time we'd specced into multicellular consumer lyfe and shut that door behind us.

(Enzymes btw are just fancy proteins; the pop-bead origami equivalent of making a bottle opener out of moulded plastic, paper, and vigorously stretched analogies)

It turns out we can just trick beans into breaking that protein down for us by patting them on the back and sending them off on the germination process, which is where we get bean sprouts from. Which are delicious and (comparatively) nutritious. I think this is also the justification for activating almonds? Nature is amazing

BUT you know what's also amazing? It's stuff made from soy beans. Soy beans are oily as well as protein-y and we can make soy milk out of them. Then we make tofu out of the soy milk. You can make all these things out of soy beans! If you let the right kinds of fungus in and let 'em party on your mashed beans-and-carbs, you can make All this good stuff too!

So having grown up with Soy For Days in my bicultural household, where miso paste was a more-than-reasonable addition to dad's Sunday roast pan-gravy, I was legitimately kind of pissed to discover in the US you grow most of it to feed to cows. Soyriously? I knew you guys grew a fuckton of corn for a similar purpose but I always associated soy as food, not as "oil plant with a bunch of leftover plantmash we may as well feed to cows". I get how hypocritical my carnivore ass is right now but if it's protein (and a complete protein) you want... guys.... it's right there.........