III: Green Bean
What happened to the string in string beans?
Good morning. Today is tridi, the 23rd of Messidor, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate l'haricot, a stereotypical vegetable that's botanically a fruit.
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There's a 55-foot-tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant – I know, more peas than green beans, but they do both – in Blue Earth, Minnesota. More specifically, it's there because a radio DJ 50 years ago got a kick out of interviewing travelers passing through town and giving them, at the end of each interview, a can of corn and peas along with a jar of the blue clay that gives the town its name. Kids would ask if he got the veggies from the Green Giant (a canning facility is there in town) and he would treat the question like a Santa Claus story, telling them they just missed him, and that they should watch out because he might step on their car on the way of out of town. When the Interstate was being built through Blue Earth, the DJ saw his opportunity to lobby the Green Giant corporation for an actual statue to satiate the kids' wonder. They obliged, sort of, asking for creative control and that the statue be paid for by the town. (This one-sided deal should sound familiar to anyone whose city recently built a sports stadium.) The town obliged, and the Green Giant is still there, causing people to pull over in the middle of Minnesota to think about green beans for a minute.
We take bulbous "French" green beans for granted today, those snapping and long beans that only have a small stem to remove and not the long string spine that is the bane of many a prep cook. But the string was only removed genetically by dogged planning by one Calvin N. Keeney, an American seed salesman who cracked the code back in XCVI (1888).
