5,000 lbs. of beans used for research at the University of Guelph donated to food bank

Beans, which might have otherwise have gone to waste, are helping the Guelph Food Bank. CTV’s Spencer Turcotte has the scoop.

Thousands of pounds of beans grown for research purposes at the University of Guelph (U of G) could have gone to waste but, instead, they’re getting a second life.

“We have pinto beans, cranberry beans, black beans, navy beans,” said Mohsen Yoosefzadeh Najafabadi, a computational biologist and assistant professor at U of G.

For more than 40 years, researchers at the university have worked to advance dry bean varieties.

“We go to the field and make crosses between different potential parental lines, create the population and, after that, we grow this population for a couple of years to make them genetically stable,” explained Yoosefzadeh Najafabadi.

The researchers work closely with bean producers to develop high-yielding plants that can resist disease and adapt to changing climates.

“At the end of the process, we get one super bean,” said Yoosefzadeh Najafabadi.

But what happens to the not-so-super ones?

“Instead of just letting them die, we decided to harvest them, then do the first step of the cleaning and donated them to our community,” Yoosefzadeh Najafabadi said.

Rather than discard the dry beans, they were donated to the Guelph Food Bank.

“They offered us about 1,000 lbs. of dried beans,” said Carolyn McLeod-McCarthy, the managing director at the Guelph Food Bank. “Our operations manager said, ‘Of course, sure, we’ll take those.’ Then I went to pick them up [Tuesday] with our volunteer driver and we have 5,520 lbs. of beans.”

The timing of the donation couldn’t come at a better time considering food bank visits have climbed.

“Everything has gone up and I would almost say, skyrocketed, in a sense,” McLeod-McCarthy said.

Earlier this week, Food Banks Canada released data that showed poverty and hunger are becoming “normalized” across the country – something the Guelph Food Bank has seen firsthand.

“From January – 3,800 mouths to feed a month, to over 5,200 in July,” said McLeod-McCarthy.

With bins upon bins of beans, it’s a donation that will go a long way to feed those in need.

Now, the work begins to sort through it all and package the beans with instructions on how to prepare them.

“We will have beans for some time now,” McLeod-McCarthy said. “It’s a great shelf staple as well, and a very versatile protein.”