Knowing Beans

I was determined to know beans. – Henry David Thoreau

This is one of my favorite passages from Walden (“The Bean-Field” chapter), one that I underlined when I first read the work, in part because it encapsulates in one brief sentence what his two-year experiment at Walden Pond, a metaphor for his desire (ultimately unfulfilled) to understand nature and transcend nature to reach a higher consciousness, and in part because it is a playful flipping of the expression “don’t know beans,” a trivial piece of knowledge raised to a grander purpose.

In a brief search for the origin of “don’t know beans,” I found four different possible explanations. One is that it’s a riddle from “old rural stores” (how old and how rural we don’t know): How many blue beans does it take to make seven white beans? The answer is seven – you peel the blue beans (presumably cooked) and the inside is white. That strikes me as a pretty lame riddle to expand from some vague country setting across time and a whole country.

Two other possibilities: First, that in Boston it might have been considered the height of ignorance not to know that Boston baked beans were made with black-eyed beans (or black-eyed peas, or cowpeas, or field peas). But with so many different names for that wild bean or pea, it seems unlikely that expression would ever have caught on, let alone spread (though Boston places it near Thoreau). Second, there is apparently an old British saying, “to know how many beans make five,” supposedly a reference to the teaching of children to count by using beans, a child reaching the ability to count up to five beans being knowledgeable. That to me seems a pretty low bar to set; my three-year-old granddaughter can already count up to ten, beans or whatever else.

The one conjecture I find most appealing, if only because it’s rooted in classical Greece and was proposed in 1869 (near Thoreau in time, and apparently a common expression then) in a copy of The Cultivator & Country Gentleman (and wasn’t that Thoreau?). In ancient Greece, elections were carried out not by paper ballots or a show of hands but by beans; a white bean was a vote for a candidate, a black bean a vote against; and when someone wasn’t sure which way to vote, they were said “not to know beans.”

Of course, we (get ready for it) can’t know beans about how the expression came about or spread. And ultimately what difference does it make? My own speculation, however, favors an origin of euphemism, that the phrase “You don’t know beans” was a toned down version of “You don’t know shit,” or bullshit or crap or some other excretory vulgarity. That would be much more in keeping with the progression of language than old rural riddles, baked beans, children counting, or Greeks voting. And then there’s also the flatulence connection . . . but I won’t go there.