I’ve mentioned on our podcast before my fatal disease of watching Facebook Reels: I’ll log in to look up where someone lives or doublecheck an event, only to get sucked into hours of short-form video by people I don’t know. This is exactly what Facebook wants for me, and I am a sucker for falling for it. For a while, it was dogs (good) or clips from Dropout (also good); sometimes it’s sendups of Christianity (funny) and other times it’s actual Christians, usually conservative (not funny). Lately, though, it’s nothing but beans.
Did you know there is a universe of bean influencers out there? OK, I guess they are more likely food influencers, but they seem particularly obsessed with beans, constantly acting like they have single-handedly discovered beans and are letting me know that beans exist for the first time. They are breathless as they extol beans’ virtues: Cheap! Plant-based protein! Fiber! Versatility! They want to convince me to eat more beans. They want to show me that they are innovating with beans, discovering ways to make beans delicious that no human has thought of before. They are uniquely passionate about butter beans, which is just another name for lima beans, and while certainly not a popular bean where I live is still a regular-ass bean and not some bean you’d only know about if you were in the secret cool kids bean club.
The recipes they make are largely pretty straightforward, especially if you are or, like me, have been a vegetarian, and so don’t have your mind blown by meals that don’t feature meat. They do a lot of beans in some kind of broth or thick sauce on the stovetop. They love serving beans over orzo or with “crusty bread.” They add vegetables. They make versions of daal or misir wat or curry that they give English names. They do all this in envy-inducing kitchens full of natural light and beautiful pans, and they wear comfy outfits and speak softly about self-care and coziness and ease. The colors are vibrant, and the sounds are soothing, and every dish is their favorite way to prepare beans and they are sure it will become my favorite too.
Especially if you don’t eat a lot of meat, you’ve probably had the experience of seeing some kind of “healthy” recipe that sounds pretty good, and doesn’t have any red flags for why it wouldn’t be good, but when you make it it’s actually disgusting. Much like I keep falling for Facebook Reels, I often fall for these recipes. Usually, they’re full of vegetables I already like that seem like they’d be great together, but the actual recipe ends up having a weird texture or bland flavor. For a while, I kept falling for green pasta sauces that involved steaming and blending broccoli and other greens. I like broccoli, and I like greens, and these basically read like versions of the pestos I already make regularly, but without fail they were hideous, with all that broccoli making an abundance of astringent sauce. Since I live alone and hate wasting food, that means my freezer sometimes gets full of these failed experiments that I think might be better later, even though they never are.
Armed with that experience, I look askance at the bean influencers’ recipes, trying not to be seduced by the colors and buzzwords and inclusion of ingredients I like, trying to parse if the recipe will actually be good or if it’s just sleight of hand around a pile of beans, which sounds good because it’s beans but will not be a thing I’ll actually want to eat once I have it. I’ll watch the videos on repeat, looking for cracks in their veneer. But sometimes you can’t really tell until you make a recipe for yourself.
This week, I had plans to make a version of shrimp and grits I’ve been intending to get to for a while, but I've been busy and haven’t had it in me to thaw the shrimp and then deal with my general anxiety about cooking seafood. (I was a vegetarian for about 16 years, and I still try not to cook meat often; I was also born without a sense of smell, which when combined with my inexperience with meat has led to a sometimes-crippling paranoia about food safety.) Annoyed with myself, and hungry, and with half a loaf of sourdough I need to get out of the freezer, I finally caved and decided to make one of the bean recipes, a miso mushroom butter beans from a site I’ve never heard of but whose video had no obvious flaws.
I figured I’d make it with white beans, but I was surprised that my grocery store had canned butter beans. I was also surprised that they were white, like they are in the influencers’ videos, and not the green I usually associate with lima beans, which I usually only find frozen. (The different color is down to different stages of maturity; who knew?) I was a little leery of the vegan sauce, which involved blending some of the beans along with cashews, but the sauce also had green flags in the form of miso and nutritional yeast, two ingredients that make anything delicious.
(If you have just yelled “nutritional yeast?!” in alarm, I have been on a lifetime campaign to get it renamed to something more accurate, like “tasty dust” or “deliciousness powder.” Nutritional yeast makes everything good. It’s an umami-packed wonder and also has a ton of B12, which your brain and body need to not feel like shit all the time.)
I took the recipe’s advice and soaked the cashews in boiling water first, a step I often skip but really shouldn’t. I even used the required shallot instead of an onion because the grocery store had shallots that didn’t look too bad. I cooked the shallot and mushrooms (she uses portobello in the video, but I used baby bella, which did you know are the same mushroom?), added the butter beans, then blitzed the sauce together and added it along with some frozen kale. Soaking the cashews made a big difference in making an actually smooth, creamy sauce without little flecks of cashew in it. It looked sort of gray and disappointing, but basically like the video without the added fancy lighting.
I ate it with a hunk of the sourdough I need to get through, and I'm both delighted and furious that it was actually fucking delicious. I’m always a little disappointed in the green lima beans, and while the butter beans didn’t change my life, they were good: big, meaty beans that are satisfying to eat, but would have been just as satisfying if they were the more common cannellini or great northern beans. The miso and nutritional yeast made the sauce savory and rich-tasting, with the lemon juice adding some life. It’s a little too hearty of a dish for the current warm weather in New York, but there’s a good chance I’ll add it to my rotation of fall and winter go-tos.
The problem here is that now it opens the door to all the other bean influencers’ recipes. If this one was good, what about the others? Should I try them? I’ve been needing more iron and protein, and also to spend less money on groceries–could beans be the answer? Have the bean influencers been right all along about the life-changing nature of beans? Have I fallen into their cursed clutches? How many bean recipes will I try before one is inevitably shit, and the whole bean influencer artifice crumbles into dust, leaving them richer off my clicks and me poorer, with a tupperware full of shitty beans?
God damn you, Facebook Reels, and god damn you, bean influencers. Thanks for the lunch, though.
