posted by on October 31, 2026
Tomorrow, some friends and I are going to get together for a new non-denominational tradition that we’re starting among our local group: Saint Bean’s Feast Day. For us, this is going to be a sort of potluck where every dish must feature at least one bean.
Back in mid-January of this year, we were all at a different friend’s house for a cookout while discussing Berkeley Bowl’s extensive produce selection. It’s the only store I know of that allows you to buy a dozen different types of eggplant.1 One friend lamented that there were too many to try and that no one would be able to determine the best eggplant without buying many pounds of it. That is, unless we had a party where everyone brought a dish that had a different kind of eggplant in it. We liked the core conceit of the party idea, but none of the rest of us wanted a meal with that much eggplant, so we brainstormed other foods that have a lot of types before deciding on beans.
National Bean Day in the United States is January 6th.2 We opted for an alternative date for scheduling Bean Day. We couldn’t find any International holiday, so I wondered if there were any saints that had bean-relations? There are, after all many, many saints.3
We learned of the Gaelic Saint Beóán of Mortlach4
His name, which could also be written in non-Gaelic contexts as Beanus, Beoanus and Beyn, means “lively one”.
was commemorated as a saint on October 26th, and we figured that a nice late-October autumnal bean festivity would be a good excuse to have warm food and hang out.
Since all of this is arbitrary, we’re going with an equally arbitrary definition of what’s a bean, for now: “anything that is a bean, comes from a bean, or is commonly associated with the word bean after it.” Vanilla beans, cacao beans, coffee beans, and soybeans are all allowed and encouraged, for instance. We have a spreadsheet for attendees to write down their dishes for allergens and to ensure no two people go in on hummus or something.
I’m personally excited for the dairy-free 5-bean tiramisu.5
You may note that tomorrow is not October 26th. The 26th this year was a Monday, which is always a difficult weekday to make feast plans around. We considered October 25th as St Bean’s Day (observed), but some people were out of town. Then I remembered that November 1st is also “All Saints’ [Including St Bean’s] Day,”6 and that’s what we went with.
Footnotes
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I didn’t know there were two types, let alone a dozen. ↩
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Would have made for a remarkably goofy alibi. ↩
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Presumably, the number being very large is why that song mentions wanting “to be in that number when the saints go marching in.” ↩
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One could argue that a feast named after a Gaelic saint is hard to keep non-denominational, but given that we are just using the vaguely similar name as an excuse for finding a convenient date, it felt like we were still on the agnostic side of things, to me. ↩
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Coffee beans, cacao beans, vanilla beans, soybeans in the silken tofu, and guar gum from guar beans to thicken the coconut cream in the vegan mascarpone mousse. ↩
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I’m intentionally ignoring that Catholics regard All Saints’ Day as a solemn holiday, that Gaelic Saint Beóán of Mortlach was from before the Scottish Reformation breaking from the Catholic Church, and that many of these beans were New World crops and would have no place in a feast for someone from ~1000AD Scotland. ↩