"Did you eat pulses this week?" asks a promotional email and Facebook ad showing up with regularity lately. Meanwhile, media outlets are suddenly going gaga for recipes like Split Pea Breakfast Pattie.
Why? Welcome to the International Year of Pulses. The initiative, declared by the 68th United Nations General Assembly, is intended to heighten awareness about a secret weapon the entire world can surely use. Pulses - crops harvested solely for their dry seeds, such as lentils, chickpeas, dried peas and beans - not only fight diseases in humans and in soils, they can help reduce global hunger and mitigate global warming.
In Alberta, the International Year of Pulses will also show the public how important pulse crops have become to Canadian farmers, said Stan Blade, dean of the Faculty of ALES.
"It's an amazing story that's occurred over a period of just three decades," said Blade.
With exports to more than 100 countries, Canada is the world's biggest supplier of pulses. In Alberta, one million acres of the province's 20 million acres of cropped land are devoted to pulses.
Alberta farmers saw the potential in pulses when competition in cereal grains was high in the late 1970s, said Blade. Improvements in irrigation, zero tillage and direct seeding, and in adapting seeds from Europe and elsewhere to prairie weather and soil conditions furthered their interest.
"The twist seemed to be when people figured out semi-leafless peas that would grow through a significant portion of the crop year," said Blade. "And probably the most important aspect: they were easy to harvest."
Now, field peas are the most widely grown pulse in Alberta, prospering in the southern, central and Peace River regions. Southern Alberta also grows some lentils, chickpeas and dry beans. Faba bean production occurs in the moister central, north-central, and Peace areas.
Farmers have embraced pulses because of their many benefits.
They're packed with fibre, protein and antioxidants, yet contain virtually no fat, so they can help prevent and manage obesity, diabetes, cancer and coronary conditions. By increasing soil microbial activity even after they are harvested, pulses are an ideal plant to use when rotating crops in fields. They reduce incidences of disease in fields, and therefore improve the world's food security. They're efficient with water, too as one pound of pulses needs 43 gallons of water compared to one pound of soya beans, which need 216.
A fact that may confirm them as a food of our future: pulses fix nitrogen in the soil, which prevents it from converting to nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas.
"It's just this magical connection between the bacteria and the plant itself," said Blade, who is also a plant scientist. He developed the Cutlass cultivar of field peas, a pulse that's still the benchmark for all pea varieties in Western Canada.
"The plant gives the bacteria some sugar and the bacteria have this chemical wizardry to take nitrogen out of the air and fix it in the soil in a form the plant can use."
In the Faculty of ALES, the many powers of pulses are being studied by numerous researchers.
Food chemist Lingyun Chen is investigating lentil protein as a new functional ingredient in bakery products, to replace egg and milk. She's also identified lentil protein's strong foaming capacity, which might help create long-life foams for various food products.
Cathy Chan, a nutritionist, and Jocelyn Ozga, a plant physiologist, have shown that by cooking pea-seed coats - the fibrous outer layer of a pea that is discarded when the fleshy embryo inside is harvested for such uses as split peas - they can enhance the fibrous material's ability to lower blood-sugar levels. That could reduce the need for glucose-regulating drugs for people with type 2 diabetes.
Their colleagues, food microbiologist Michael Gänzle and animal microbiologist Ben Willing, are studying whether eating deeply pigmented pea coats can also protect our gut microbiome from salmonella.
The research group led by process engineer Marleny Aranda Saldaña has multiple pulse-related studies on the go, including evaluating pulse husk byproducts as rich sources of cellulose and organic antioxidants for use in an array of applications.
Meanwhile, grain processing expert Thava Vananthan has developed a novel technology that enables dry processing of pulse grains into dietary fibre concentrates and starch/protein concentrates. It reduces the cost of processing by 50 to 60 per cent, and creates nutritionally superior fractions (separate portions of an ingredient with different properties).
Yet despite the numerous clever uses scientists can envision for pulses in the future, there are easily as many delicious ways to eat them, already. In fact, it takes Dean Blade barely a beat to identify his favourite concoction.
"There's something called akara balls in Nigeria. Ground up cow pea, mixed with onion and hot pepper and deep fried, and it is to die for," he said.
For more information on pulses, visit the Pulse Pledge website.