ONE of the oldest cultivated legumes; high in nutrients; deliciously sweet and nutty – broad beans (or fava beans as they are also known), have a lot going for them.

They even contain an amino-acid L-dopa, which stimulates the brain to produce the happy chemical dopamine.

If you’re a home vegetable grower you’ll already know they are pretty easy to maintain in the veg patch and are great for restoring nutrients back into the soil.

This is because they are able to take nitrogen gas from the atmosphere and transfer it into the soil.

Most plants are unable to absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere and so planting beans is a great way to prepare the soil for hungry crop like tomatoes, broccoli or peppers that can only take nutrients and essential building blocks from the soil through their roots.

And yet even with such a positive persona it seems that throughout history they’ve had a bit of a dark reputation.

They were famously condemned by the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, who prohibited his followers (Pythagoreans), from eating them along with meat and fish. It is thought that the innocuous bean was particularly sacred to the Pythagoreans because fava plants have hollow stems, and it was believed that souls of the deceased would travel through the ground, up the hollow stems, into the beans where they would reside.

It is even said that Pythagoras had such an aversion to the beans they indirectly caused his death: some stories suggest that when his enemies drove him out of his house towards a bean field, he said that he would rather die than walk through the field and so was left waiting there for his pursuers to slit his throat.

But I’d encourage you to think of them as a bringer of life rather than death, not only because they can breath new life into soil but also into us humans.

Packed with protein they’re a great substitute for those of us cutting down our meat consumption.

I’m certainly looking forward to a bean feast this week at all our Cultivate stops.