February 10 - World Pulses Day

nPosted on February 10, 2020

Key Points

When I hear the word pulse, I think of a blood pulse – the rhythm you can feel in your wrist as your heart beats out blood and the blood beats that rhythm all through your body.

nOn second thought, I also think of music pulsing – music with a good, strong beat, that is!

nBut! – I didn’t know that the word pulse also means the edible seeds of various plants: chickpeas, lentils, beans, peas, etc.

nIt is that completely separate meaning of the word pulse that we are celebrating today in this United Nations event. Pulses are important foods, globally, especially nowadays.

Beef farming is so inefficient, it
represents a 96% loss of food production!

nRaising and eating meat is a problem for several reasons: religious reasons, health reasons, and especially environmental reasons. It takes less a lot less energy, land, and water to produce plant-based foods than to grow livestock we use as meat. And some livestock (ahem, cows, looking at you!) add global-warming-causing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

nIf a country didn’t add any acres of land dedicated to agriculture, not even one acre, but only grew plants, they could grow 2 to 20 TIMES more food. (Read more about this here.)

Since there are A LOT of people in the world, including a lot of hungry people who regularly don’t get enough to eat, it’s important to get as much food from ever acre of agricultural land as possible. And pulses are especially wonderful foods among all the other great plant-based foods, because they are high protein and high fiber, with lots of vitamins and minerals (including iron!). Pulses are also low fat.

n(People on low carb diets often limit how many beans, lentils, etc., they eat, because these nutritious foods do have carbs, but again, much of the carbohydrates are dietary fiber, which is a necessary part of a healthy diet.)

nCheck out this website as you plan your World Pulses Day celebration. Eat pulse-based meals and photograph them for social media, using #LovePulses and #WorldPulsesDay hashtags.