Intriguing facts and entertaining true stories serve as the lattice of A History of the World in Twelve Beans by Joël Broekaert, translated by Michele Hutchison. Broekaert, a Dutch culinary journalist with a background in history (and judge on his country's Celebrity MasterChef), takes readers on a brisk, friendly tour of world history using beans as a focal point. He begins his bean journey with the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, in which lentils are a key feature, and ends with how the protein-rich lupin bean might help save the world from climate change. In between, Broekaert stops in--among many locations--the Aztec Empire, where "everything was priced in cocoa beans, from turkeys to sex," with the acknowledgement that cocoa beans are the seeds of fruit (therefore, not a legume); and the Napoleonic era, when canning was invented by French confectioner Nicolas Appert, who was looking to win a prize for food preservation. The first food to be canned was, of course, beans.
Unlike beans (cue a humorous section that employs ancient Greek philosophers to expound on the persistent issue of beans and flatulence over time), Boekaert's writing is easily digestible. He has arranged the book into 13 chapters of about 10 pages each, in roughly chronological order. The chapters can be read individually--all but one were originally published in the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland--but when read as assembled, the accumulated experiences and anecdotes cross-pollinate and create a fascinating viewpoint of the role of beans in human history and development. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator