Every bean seed bears a scar where its umbilical cord once attached

Evidence

Beans too grow like babies in the womb. The students are contentedly munching fresh pole beans. I ask them to first open a slender pod, to see what they’re eating. Jed slits a pod with his thumbnail and opens it. There they are, bean babies, ten in a row. Each little beanlet is attached to the pod by a fragile green cord, the funiculus. Just a few millimeters long, it is the analog to the human umbilical cord. Through this cord, the mother plant nourishes her growing offspring. The students crowd around to look. Jed asks, “Does that mean a bean has a belly button?” Everybody laughs, but the answer is right there. Every bean has a little scar from the funiculus, a colored spot on its seed coat, the hilum. Every bean does have a belly button. These plant mothers feed us and leave their children behind as seeds, to feed us again and again. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 478

Categorization

• CANDY: Beans literally have belly buttons (the hilum scar from the funiculus) — a charming, tweetable food fact.
• SEED: A piece could run on ‘the belly button test’ as a doorway for getting kids and adults to see anatomy in ordinary food.