bean influencers have me wanting to buy the Good Beans to try cooking with, but all the bean influencers in my life live in the usa! so I can't just follow a link to their preferred bean source (rancho gordo). bc cross-border shipping is always outrageously expensive. I need to figure out a purveyor of quality heirloom beans in canada!

#SophCooks

ok genuinely I have not yet found a single place in canada who will ship reasonable quantities of even ONE type of heirloom bean to me

I could buy a 24 lb box, of one of three bean varieties, from a farm in atlantic canada! or I could buy packets of like 40 individual seed beans, intended for growing my own heirloom beans. and NOTHING in between.

the only dry beans I seem to be able to buy are the same 5 or so standard beans types you can get in any grocery store.

this is a genuine tragedy! where are the BEANS, canada!!!

I keep on briefly getting my hopes up, and then discovering that once again I've ended up on the website of some random local heirloom bean purveyor in the usa. even the smallest of which seem to have dozens of types of beans. why does canada hate beans, and hate me?!

@soph_sol you might need to go local? Are there like, csa’s or community farms or box schemes near where you live? They might grow quite a few things they don’t necessarily actively advertise. (Sorry if this is a useless idea in your context, I don’t actually have any idea what the Canadian food system is like! But that’s what I would have done here in the UK, in the years before Hodmedods* was founded). (*they’re our one single company that market traditional, UK grown pulses not found in standard supermarkets, like Carlin peas. They’ve only been around for about ten years)

@kittyc I know all the local CSAs, and beans are not in their purview! or rather - storage beans are not. the kind of beans you eat fresh would be the only beans a csa would offer. they exclusively do fresh vegetables, with occasional forays into eggs and flowers. alas!

@soph_sol oh, that’s a shame! Perhaps you can persuade them to branch out? There’s nothing fundamentally different about the growing techniques for storage beans as opposed to the ones eaten fresh - you just let them carry on until they’re ripe instead of harvesting them green basically. They might be up for experimenting a bit? But of course that’s a long term project, a far cry from just being able to go online and order a 500g bag of beans from a choice of a dozen varieties 😭

@soph_sol @kittyc i think usually its the storage issues that get smaller farms? for a small farm that only does fresh fruit/veg they often aren’t really equipped to store what they harvest for more than a few days whereas dried beans depend on an economy of harvesting all at once and then storing to sell thruout the year

they may still be amenable though to doing at least some quantities, esp if they can mark some portion of the crop down as guaranteed quick sales (thru putting it in CSAs or preorder or whatever) — a farm near my house recently acquired a dehydrator so they can sell dried fruit outside of the growing season and its so nice to get a cup of cranberries in with my fresh produce every week!

@Satsuma @kittyc yeah the storage issues are definitely real! but also I get the sense in my city that the sorts of white middle class liberals who make up the majority of a csa's customer base simply aren't eating a legume-heavy diet

@kittyc @soph_sol middle class liberals should learn to appreciate the humble bean imo

@Satsuma @kittyc they should!!

@soph_sol @kittyc this farm seems to sell lentil-containing soup mixes so maybe if you called them and asked they’d mail you Just The Lentils instead??? https://www.swallowtailfarmstead.ca/store/p552/Lentil_%26_Herb_Curry_Mix.html

downside: having to call and ask

@soph_sol @kittyc not a ton of variety but they do sell beans in reasonable direct to consumer portions! https://adagioacres.com/product-category/oats/