dfreybur
Premium Member
Legumes?
Since Masonry is a gigantic engine for teaching vocabulary I'll add the word pulses and the term "nitrogen fixing".
Legumes are nitrogen fixing plants that are grown for their seeds and seed pods to be eaten by humans. Beans, lentils and peas. The fact that soy beans are widely fed to livestock does not matter for the term as soy beans are eaten by very many humans.
Pulses are legumes that are dried. Also beans, lentils and peas. But green beans, sweet peas, edamame are legumes but not pulses as they are eaten fresh not dried.
There are all sorts of overlap in the terms. Clover is a nitrogen fixing crop but as it is targeted at cattle it doesn't count as a legume in the dietary sense. Peanuts are peas not nuts. When I "Visualize whorled peas" I picture people of many lands sharing peanut butter.
A fun aspect of legumes is they count as both meat substitutes and veggie substitutes. Or as both meat substitutes and veggies if you count beans as a type of veggie. When I wrote "meat and veggies, legumes and fruit" I could have written "meat and meat substitutes, veggies and veggie substitutes" but not all that many people think of fruit as "veggie substitutes".