The Curious Case of Bean Trying

Dear Tamar: 

I’m writing to get your advice about how to help my kids learn to like beans. I’ve tried it all —  mashed into tacos, blitzed into pasta sauces, folded into enchiladas and chana masalas alike — but any bean-containing meal I make gets a solid thumbs down from my crew. In the interest of saving the planet and saving our budget, I’m hoping to get them on board with beans and would love your help! Thanks so much! 

-Bean Trying So Hard

Dear Bean Trying:

You don’t need me to give you more-ideas-for-things-to-make-with-beans. You are a Cook, and–I can’t help but notice–you write beautifully about food. When I’d finished reading your mashing and blitzing and folding, I wanted to eat your beans, which I’m fairly sure you cook perfectly—to tender and well-seasoned. 

But, I–unlike your kids–love beans. I always have. My mother was a vegetarian when I was little. We ate black beans and pigeon peas and chickpeas and lentils…constantly. There was a much longer list of foods, however, that I didn’t like. Here are just some: milk, cheese, fish sticks, grilled cheese, mac-and-cheese, tuna, mayonnaise, chicken, yogurt, hamburgers, hot-dogs, egg yolks, pancakes, waffles, scrambled eggs, fried-eggs, poached eggs, fish, bagels, cream-cheese, ketchup…Basically if it wasn’t a steak or potato (or a bean), I wasn’t into it. And not just “not into it.” I got a nauseous, sweating head spinning, “I’m going to die if I eat this” feeling if I encountered any.

My childhood household was strict, and if I could force myself to eat something I didn’t like–by swallowing it without chewing, or by imagining myself somewhere else–I did. My father, in particular, found it unbearable to watch me turn up my nose at food. He had, as a child, lived through the siege on Jerusalem—most of it alone. He’s not alive anymore, so I can’t verify this, but I always got the sense that he’d endured real difficulty. It hurt and angered him to watch me turn down foods he could only have dreamed of. 

But I don’t know that what I learned from all of it was worth learning. I learned that someone else’s emotions were more important than mine. And that if something I felt strongly made someone else unhappy, I should stop feeling it, or hide that I did. I’ve been unlearning it for years, successfully. I bring this up only to point out two things: that being coerced to eat didn’t teach me empathy or gratitude, but rather self-subordination, AND that all of this happened while I was happily eating beans. 

You’re helping your kids to learn to like beans by liking them yourself. It might not happen soon, and it might not happen consciously, but having watched you enjoy beans for years, they will have a set of associations with them. And those associations will be positive–with your cooking something you like and enjoying it.

My advice, Dear cook, is that you not muddy the rather clear waters of good example with coercion or expectation. Only blitz if you want your beans blitzed. And at any meal where you serve your blitzed beans, serve, if you can, something your kids eat happily–not for you but for them–and that goes with the meal, so they’re learning a little about gastronomy too. It’s hard to know what lessons we’re teaching, but I think the lightest hand tends to be the one that does the least unintentional harm. Your kids will be on board, I imagine, with beans, and whatever else, when the next group that has a strong influence on them–their peers–raise the stakes in a different way, in the way only peers can. You will have done your part. I’d argue you already have. You’ve bean trying long enough.