Four Pounds of Pinto Beans 🫘

While American culture has this unhealthy obsession over expensive meat for boosting protein intake to unhealthy levels, beans remain my preferred way to have a healthy amount of protein in my diet. While it’s true beans alone are not a complete protein as they lack methionine, combined with nearly any kind of grains – be it rice or whole wheat flour or many vegetables at some point in your day – you get a complete series of protein.

Beans are very affordable and long lasting, especially if purchased in bulk. They don’t produce a lot of garbage unlike so much packaged foods these days – that four pound bag of dried pinto beans has provided several weeks of beans, split into two batches, boiled then half of those frozen and other half used in rice, mashed and used in eggs, cooked with zucchini, enjoyed with lunch, and drizzled with sugar-free maple syrup and a little salt as a filling snack.

People say too much beans make you gassy. People who say such things are not wrong, over time your stomach adapts to a high protein diet that contains a large amount of non-digestible sugars. They become more digestible over time. That said, I’ve overdone it before and eaten way too much especially with sugar-free syrup making for smelly bathrooms and being a bit gassy. But in moderation, they are wonderful.

Most dried beans are an incredible bargain, at anything beyond the two pound bags, and the value only grows the larger the bag you purchase. Bigger bags means they last longer and less trash per unit of beans. I also get black beans, kidney beans, cranberry beans, and navy beans. And sometimes chickpeas and lentils. Any kind of dried beans you can’t go wrong. Yes, there is electricity consumed in their cooking and freezing or chilling in the fridge, but on a per-healthy calorie basis and considering the protein you et from eating beans you can’t wrong.