Bricolage Gardening

Ponderings on how growing and eating more pulses in the UK could improve our health, reduce agricultural emissions and make our food system more resilient.

Where it all began

“Children understand the concept of baked beans”, the words of a Bristolian school chef during a discussion on how the city could transition to a more sustainable food system as part of the Bristol Good Food by 2030 campaign. It got a few chuckles from the crowd, but this trivial comment got me thinking – How important is children’s grasp, familiarity and love of baked beans in achieving a more nutritious, ecological and resilient food system?

Revolution stews

One month later, and I am sitting down at St. Columbus Church searching for answers. It is the 17th annual Oxford Real Farming Conference, a gathering of a thousand farmers, growers, activists and agroecological ‘cranks’ chewing the cud on how we can create a farming revolution. As soon as the program was released, there was one workshop I wasn’t going to miss: ‘Growing a love for pulses in schools’. Perfect.

The panel was expertly equipped to expand my mind on all things existential about baked beans. Nick Saltmarsh, co-founder of Hodmedod (more on them later) is by default British pulse royalty. Joining him were Bee Wilson, food journalist, author and co-founder of Taste-Ed, which she established with fellow panellist and headteacher, Jason O’Rourke. Together, they painted a picture of a more pulse-oriented food and farming landscape where the humble bean can take centre stage.

Spilling the beans

When talking about a pulse revolution in the UK, you’d be mad to think of getting by for long without mentioning baked beans. As Nick Saltmarsh pointed out, some 2 million tins of the stuff are sold each day. In a nation where pulses don’t turn many heads, baked beans manage to make up for this in their national treasure status.

The dish’s origins can be traced to traditional Native American ‘bean pots’, which would have been made with beans, maple syrup, and animal fats. After being put through the typical colonial melting pot, baked beans first rolled out onto British shelves of Fortnum and Mason back in the late 19th Century as a bourgeois delicacy, and by the mid-20th century were a mainstay in British cupboards. But in a world where there are over 400 varieties of dried beans for cooking, is one variety (Phaseolus vulgaris), grown overseas, and covered in salt & sugar, the best that we can do? How could we inspire the next generation to explore the plethora of pulse possibilities?

Sauce – the gateway drug into pulses

Headed up by their ‘Bean Curriculum Working Group’, (please God let me join this inner circle), TasteED have been on a mission to figure this out through their food-education programs, which have now been rolled out in 1,800 primary schools across the UK. And it turns out that baked beans might just be the stepping stone. As Bee Wilson pointed out, creating a sense of familiarity with new food is one of the essential approaches they use in their TasteED sessions to give children the confidence and curiosity to try something new. And what could be more familiar than… you guessed it.

One of their crowd favourites is getting kids to recreate, perhaps, the only pulse-based dish they’ve ever eaten. But instead of out of a can and up to its teeth in sugar, they make them with fresh, simple and healthy ingredients. It’s no surprise, really, that the baked beans 2.0 go down well. If there was one thing the whole panel could agree on, it’s that kids f***ing love sauce.

Through exploration and playfulness, TasteED has managed to inspire children to get more than just baked beans on the menu. As Jason O’Rourke testified, after one of their pulse-focused sessions, multiple children asked their school chef for more bean stews.

At this stage, you’re probably thinking – “Barney, that was a great ‘bit’ on how we could get kids to eat more than just baked beans. But why do we even need a pulse revolution, and could you perhaps summarise it in two or so paragraphs to keep this to a 5-minute read?”

The ecological credentials of beans

To keep it brief, let’s just say that in trading in his family cow for some magical beans, Jack might have been on to something. More than just their nutritional credentials, increasing the diversity and quantity of pulses in our diet would have huge benefits to our nation’s dietary footprint. The current picture isn’t pretty. The meat and dairy-heavy diet that dominates UK and Western diets is problematic. Firstly, because of its high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, it contributes significantly to climate breakdown, but also due to its disastrous impacts on wildlife, explaining why agriculture is the largest contributor to biodiversity loss on our planet. This is a result of animal “products” requiring drastically more land to produce the same amount of food as grains, vegetables and pulses.

As much as I value and believe in animals as an integrated part of our landscape, the industrial food system and Western diet have taken things to an unprecedented level of ecological disaster. And sometimes the numbers just don’t lie. In 2023, I helped to set up and run a community garden growing produce for food banks in Somerset. On an area of forty by twenty metres, about the size of three allotments or 1/9th of a football pitch, we were able to grow a whopping 760kg of fresh produce (including lots of beans and peas), even when leaving around a quarter to wildlife habitat and flowers. To put that into quite striking contrast, according to statistics from Our World In Data, if we had grazed the same area for beef, we would have produced a meagre 2.5kg! At a time when wildlife is crying out for more space, eating more pulses is an essential strategy to meet this need.

Fortunately, many great farmers and thinkers are doing their bit to shift our food system back into a more harmonious relationship with the ecological boundaries of the planet we depend upon. The likes of Hodmedod’s have been aspiring to get pulses sown in our fields once again, celebrating these versatile crops which have been grown on our island since the first Iron Age agricultural settlers arrived. But of course, the fields and landscape will only ever be a reflection of what our plates look like, highlighting why initiatives such as TastED are so valuable.

New Ground

Hope lies in creating a food-landscape that is both in keeping with our dietary needs and, crucially, our planet’s ecological boundaries. As a baked bean & cheese enthusiast myself (an easy lunch for a short-on-time veg grower), my cognitive dissonance makes me want to believe that there is no reason to look past my humble lunch. But to take a leaf from this short monologue, I hope to also find myself on an adventure of curiosity and playfulness towards a diet and (therefore) landscape of pulse variety & more space for wildlife!