Beans and the Blue Zones

A mix of black-eyed peas, black seeded snake beans and brown seeded snake beans, all home grown and harvested today, about to go in the slow cooker.

I’m fascinated by the Blue Zones research. The blue zones were originally five, now six, places in the world where people routinely live healthy active lives well into their nineties. It’s not so much extending life that’s interesting – it’s having a generation of people who have the long view, who are are sources of wisdom and experience, people who are free from bearing, or causing, the burden of chronic health care and who are useful and valuable members of their communities right to the end of their lives. It’s where I want to be as I get older.

The six places are so diverse that identifying the common factors is intriguing. They both are and aren’t what modern Western lifestyle advice tells us is healthy living. There’s no gym membership or jogging in there, for example. But there is a life in which movement, lots of it, is a normal part of every day. Less mechanical means of labour saving, more using muscles and body – food production by gardening, for example, rather than driving a harvester, walking rather than driving, sweeping rather than robovac-ing, hauling fishing nets, turning the handle on the pasta maker, rolling out tortillas. There’s no paleo diets in there, but there is also no ultra processed food.

There are nine identified common factors in all, including a life with purpose, a little bit of wine, stress reduction routines, strong social bonds. But the one I started this post with is beans. Less meat, more legumes. Doesn’t seem to matter what kind – black beans in Costa Rica and soy beans in Japan – but some kind of beans every day. It’s a very cheap, easy, delicious and satisfying Blue Zone lifestyle hack. 

Beans of one kind or another are easy to grow in just about any climate – seven year beans in temperate climates, Madagascar beans in the tropics and subtropics. Broad beans in Melbourne, snake beans in Brisbane, adzuki beans in temperate zones, black-eyed peas in the tropics and subtropics. Legumes are so cheap to buy, gardeners often skip them, but homegrown are (like so many foods) a totally different thing to the product you find in the supermarket. They cook so much faster, for starters. Even my Madagascar beans that have been in the jar since last autumn, almost a year now, cook up fine without soaking, a few hours in a slow cooker, mere minutes in a pressure cooker.

One of the first posts on this blog, over a decade ago, was Bean Basics – the basics of growing and cooking dried and stored beans. These days, I cook my beans mostly in the slow cooker – a vintage crock pot I picked up from the op shop – using solar power that would otherwise be shunting. The longer, slower cooking removes the need to soak, (and the need to remember I have beans cooking!)

There is pretty well always a container of cooked beans in the fridge. We eat them as a bean paste in quesadillas, as chili beans, bean burgers, ful medames, baked beans, frijoles con queso, as refritos beside an egg for breakfast, in soups and stews and casseroles, added to a salad to make it into a meal all on its own. Protein, fibre, complex carbs, versatility, deliciousness. And a step into a blue zone.