I do not eat beans.
People are often upset to hear the news that I do not eat beans. They seem to take it very personally as if they have a great stake in my bean consumption.
“You can’t say that! What if you were trapped in the wilderness and beans were the only thing you had to eat? Then what?”
I am ordinarily opposed to hypotheticals like this. It feels unfair to force somebody to consider such a strange and unlikely scenario, especially one with so many unanswered questions. How would such a situation possibly come to be? Why beans in particular?
Against all odds, though — possibly as some sort of cruel, divine joke — this is exactly what happened to me for a week in the late summer of 2015. I was on a new student backpacking trip in the Adirondacks arranged by my new college. We had burned through all of our non-bean food in the first week, and the unthinkable had come to be.
I watched helplessly as the disaster approached. The potatoes were gone. Then went the cheese. Even the massive supply of lunch meats began to dwindle. My group’s bean supply, however, was untouched. In the final days, I began to quietly stockpile the granola bars that would serve as my emergency food supply.
My luck ran out with more than a week in the wilderness to go. I was trapped in the wilderness. (The fine line between “backpacking” and being “trapped in the wilderness,” it turns out, is the available non-bean food supply.) Beans were the only thing I had to eat. I did not eat them. I made a good-faith effort, but I found the taste and texture to be so repulsive that I could not bring myself to swallow even a spoonful. The bean defenders of the world got the answer to their hypothetical question. I am a consistent man.
There is a group picture from the last day of the trip in which I look emaciated. I am staring wildly off in another direction, possibly contemplating eating boiled tree bark. I had still not ingested a single bean. (The picture was taken 12 hours before I wept out of happiness while eating ice cream from a bucket in the parking lot of some nameless upstate New York Walmart and 24 hours before I would discover the joy of the college cafeteria, so I landed on my feet.)
It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of my hatred of the bean. I remember being particularly offended by the smell of school lunch green beans, but that was not the beginning of the issue. My feelings on beans were already fully developed during my childhood when my parents started a special bean and rice diet.
The bean and rice diet came to be after my mother read an article about a society somewhere in the world where everybody ate only beans and rice and was purported to live 150 as a result. This, my parents decided, was worth a shot. Personally, if I was only eating beans and rice, living to 150 would be very low on my list of wishes.
The Bean Time lasted many months, during which I found myself cycling between horror and amusement. Most upsetting of all was that the beans and rice were not prepared separately for each meal, but rather in very great quantities on Sunday afternoon and refrigerated for the week ahead. By Friday, my parents were eating cold beans that were nearly a week old. It was horrific.
Eventually, it became a sort of party trick. My friends would listen to the details of the unfolding catastrophe with disbelief, and I would punctuate my telling with a call to my parents on speakerphone. “Dad,” I would say as my friends listened in, “what’s for dinner?” The answer never changed, and my friends’ incredulity would transform at once into pity as I hung up the phone and put on the most sorrowful expression I could muster.
Years later, my parents defend the Bean Time. “The beans were a base,” they insist. “We put kale on it, too.”
I liked to imagine the segment that might appear on Channel 8 after I starved to death. They would use my photo from last year’s school picture day, which wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. Perhaps they would even send a truck down from Grand Rapids and have a reporter interview the neighbors. “They seemed so ordinary. We never thought it could have happened on Twelfth Street. Now that you mention it, they haven’t been bringing home a lot of groceries lately.”
Then they would cut back to solemn host in the studio. “Thank you, Brian. Just heartbreaking news from Holland this evening. You’d think they would have just listened when he asked for pizza.”
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free” by Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel from ProPublica.
I never pay for convenience. I have not ordered food delivery in my adult life. I have been known to walk for miles or strap a bike to my car to avoid a $5 parking charge. This year, TurboTax wants me to pay $70 for the pleasure of filing my own taxes, and I will not stand for it.
My tax situation is not all that complex. I am a single young person with one income, but I sold $25 worth of stock that I bought on an app, which has cast me into the chasm of doom for the 2020 tax year.
I will not pay a private company for the pleasure of filing my taxes. I will go to school for accounting and learn to do everything myself on paper before I let TurboTax win. This is an outrage! In fact, like most things in the country, it is a perfectly explainable and avoidable outrage.
For years, TurboTax has lobbied our government to keep the tax system as complicated as possible so that Americans will be driven to TurboTax. TurboTax, in turn, capitalizes on the Americans’ fear, uncertainty, and doubt (this is a real marketing concept for them. They abbreviate it “FUD.”) to upsell them to TurboTax’s premium products.
A better, simpler tax system is possible that does not involve Americans spending their weekend sifting through bizarre forms. We deserve that system and TurboTax has stolen it from us.
“I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me” by Emily Delaney in McSweeney’s.
“When this little routine first started, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I was an escape. I was an adventure. I was beloved. But somewhere along the way, I became your everything.”