Rice is god, but lentils are my life

I often refer to an "original sin" that humans committed, which is the cause of daily complaints that we have about work.  You know, "the worst mistake ever," as Jared Diamond phrased it.   The invention of settled agriculture, and the life away from hunting and gathering, has condemned us to working, even if they are only bullshit jobs.

Diamond wrote:

For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

When hunting and gathering, humans worked just about enough to get their food.  Even if they wanted to get more, well, there was no storing that dead animal or the berries, right?  Further, they had way more variety in their diets than we do.  Oh well, we traded that life for the dependable supply of a more limited variety of food that could be saved for the literal and metaphorical rainy day.  And, 12,000 years later, here we are with our fancy computers and planning to send humans to Mars!

In this story of life after the Neolithic Revolution:

The crucial role of wheat, goats and sheep is always emphasized.  Legumes, not just lentils but chickpeas, vetches and later peas, somehow get short shrift. But it is likely that they play as great or even greater a role than meat and dairy in supplying protein to the growing population.  This is a matter of simple efficiency. Per acre, lentil provides more calories than grazing cattle.

Give beans the Aretha Franklin treatment--give them R.E.S.P.E.C.T. ;)

It is not only efficiency, but also the insurance against possible famines.  Why?  "Beans are practically indestructible if thoroughly dried and well stored."  Add to this the roots of the legumes drawing nitrogen from the air and fixing it in the soil, thereby making land more productive.  No wonder that Umberto Eco, from the land of pasta e fagioli, declared that beans saved European civilization:

But what I really want to talk about is beans, and not just beans but also peas and lentils. All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). And as I mentioned earlier, this poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields. So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.
We believe that the inventions and the discoveries that have changed our lives depend on complex machines. But the fact is, we are still here -- I mean we Europeans, but also those descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Spanish conquistadors -- because of beans. Without beans, the European population would not have doubled within a few centuries, today we would not number in the hundreds of millions and some of us, including even readers of this article, would not exist.

 All these do add up a hill of beans! ;)

ps: Yep, am continuing with the book on beans ;)