On Food and Cooking

in their dry form that we harvest most legume
crops, since they can be stored indefinitely
and are a concentrated source of nourishment
(see chapter 9). Green beans and peas are
immature pods and/or seeds, harvested before
they begin to dry out, and are both very
ancient and very recent foods. Early humans
likely first ate the green pods and seeds, since
dried seeds required cooking. However, the
dried forms were so much more useful that
varieties with pods specialized for eating
green — with no tough inner “parchment”
layer and reduced fiber throughout — have
only been bred for a few hundred years.
Green legume seeds are tasty and
nourishing because they’re collecting sugars,
amino acids, and other nutrients from the rest
of the plant, but haven’t yet packed them all
into compact and tasteless starch and proteins.
The green pods are tasty and nourishing
because they serve as a temporary storage
depot for the seeds’ supplies. The pods also