Why you should eat lentils every day

Today, the lentil is again on the front lines. This time, against climate change. While start-ups scramble to engineer a sustainable protein, from lab-grown meat to fake burgers, lentils are a ready solution, one with a proven record.

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The rest of the world has known this for millennia. From India’s red lentil to the French Le Puy to black “beluga” lentils, so named for their resemblance to caviar, the world grows about 6 million tons every year. Unlike corn and other grains, lentils can thrive on arid lands with little water where many other crops wither — while building up the soil.

When it comes to combating climate change, the lentil may be the perfect legume. They’re also, as the caviar mention implies, delicious. So why do Americans eat fewer lentils than almost everyone else?

Here’s how you can return the lentil to its rightful place at humanity’s table.

How much protein do lentils have?

Lentils are pulses, or the edible seed of a legume plant. This category of dry beans or seeds — as opposed to fresh green beans — encompasses everything from black beans to chickpeas to pigeon peas. They’re older than agriculture, as archaeological evidence suggests humans collected wild varieties more than 13,000 years ago.

There’s a good reason. While not as dense or digestible as meat once they are cooked, lentils become a complete protein similar to meat when combined with many grains. They’re also a slow burn, satiating hunger for hours.

And unlike red meats, particularly those that have been processed, lentils have none of the saturated fats and additives that raise the risks of cancer and heart disease. They also contain iron, zinc, magnesium, potassium and vitamin B, as well as most of the essential amino acids.

“That’s one of the beauties of lentils,” says Bruce Maxwell, a plant ecologist at Montana State University. “It’s really high in the precursors for human health.”

How much lentils Americans eat

Yet legumes remain sparse in the American diet, says Tim McGreevy, CEO of the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council, a trade group. While Indians consume about 40 pounds of pulses per person annually, and Spaniards come close to 20 pounds per person, Americans remain in the low teens. One study estimated just 8 percent of the U.S. population eats pulses on any given day.

In March 2020, pulses received another boost when much of the United States shut down. During the pandemic, they flew off grocery shelves, and lentils were in particularly high demand. Sara Mader, CEO of Palouse Brand, one of the largest online pulse retailers, says the era of lentil sales can be divided into times before and after the pandemic.

Annual sales of its brown Pardina lentil rose 860 percent after shutdowns in March 2020, compared to a year earlier. They haven’t slowed much since. Lentils are now one of Palouse Brand’s top three sellers, Mader says.

Climate impacts

What’s good for you is also good for the land. America’s most popular crops, like wheat and corn, often degrade the soil over time. Legumes like lentils rebuild it.

That’s what happened on Mader’s family farm, which grows crops under the Palouse Brand name. For 125 years, the family has farmed the rich soil of Washington state’s eastern flank, which has sediment deposited there after the last ice age. But after a century of cultivation, the region’s fertility was eroding fast. So in the 1930s, Mader’s family tried something different. They rotated chickpeas, peas and lentils into their wheat fields. By the 1980s, they also adopted no-till farming, leaving organic matter on the surface instead of plowing it.

While uncommon at the time, the Mader family’s embrace of legumes in Palouse, Wash., was prophetic. Today, about a third of the farm is always planted with legumes. And farms like Mader’s in North America now produce more than half the world’s crop of lentils in fields stretching from the Pacific Northwest to Canada’s interior.

That’s rebuilding the region’s soil, and lowering carbon emissions. Lentils, like almost all legumes, pull nitrogen out of the air and deposit it underground, thanks to bacteria on their roots. Not only does this fertilize the legumes, it also enables the soil to hold more nutrients and water for the next crop, displacing carbon-intensive nitrogen fertilizers. Even better, lentils generally need no irrigation, surviving on rainfall alone.

Farmers across the region now rotate lentils into their former monocultures of wheat. Mader says the soil health on her family’s farm is better than it has been in anyone’s lifetime. And we’ll need more farms like hers.

In 2019, the EAT-Lancet Commission, a collaboration by dozens of leading scientists, designed a diet capable of sustaining 10 billion people and the planet by 2050. The findings, peer-reviewed by the respected British medical journal Lancet, recommended doubling the amount of legumes in our diet, roughly equal to the amount of animal protein.

“Food is the single strongest lever to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth,” the scientists wrote.

How to eat lentils

If there’s a challenge for lentils in the United States, it’s that their biggest fans don’t live here. McGreevy says North American farmers are still shipping about 55 percent of their crop overseas, often to India and Europe.

To expand lentils across the United States and Canada, farmers need a stable domestic market.

Steve Sando is proving it’s possible. The founder of the heirloom bean purveyor Rancho Gordo, he has turned the humble bean into a coveted crop. Growing up in California’s wine country, he wondered why legumes weren’t accorded the same regard. So he started Rancho Gordo, sourcing and selling tasty beans from around the world. His “Bean Club” started as a joke, inspired by Napa’s pricey wine clubs. It now claims 20,000 members, with even more people on the waiting list.

Yet as a child, even Sando disdained lentils. “I grew up on old bins of brown lentils at the food co-op,” he said. “I hated them.” That echoes many first impressions of the pulse: mushy, tasteless and boring. But new varieties and exciting preparations are on hand.