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I had no idea dried beans had such potential to contain gluten. This thread came across my local celiac listserv. I'm off all legumes now, so I don't care, but I was shocked nonetheless.
I wonder whether soaking them and rinsing before cooking is enough to "clean off" the gluten??
I was browsing the dried beans, surprising that that is such an issue, and found Timeless Foods dried beans at MOMs. There is no statement of wheat or gluten or shared equpt/facility on the package, but I emailed them nontheless. Good thing - they are NOT gluten free.
The lentils, flax, and peas are all in themselves gluten free, as you know, but they aren’t processed in a dedicated gluten-free facility. More than that, the lentils are often grown together with wheat, barley, or other cereal grains, making it impossible to guarantee that they are 100% gluten-free, due to the possibility of contamination with both grain or grain dust regardless of how they are subsequently processed.
We do clean lentils in equipment that is also used to cleaned wheat and barley, and the facility that decorticates some of our lentils also pearls grains, like barley. In short, our facility is not gluten-free, because we often process the wheat grown with the lentils when we separate them ourselves, so the lentils all go through equipment that has handled wheat. We do clean the equipment after using it for different products, but that often can’t completely remove contamination.
The ancient grains we sell in our retail package line along with our peas, flax, and lentils, Purple Prairie Barley and Farro, and while they do contain gluten, some people with a wheat intolerance can tolerate them, but it varies by person.
Not all lentils are grown simultaneously with grain, but to be sure you’d need the assurance of the grower as well as the processor. I hope this information is helpful, and I’m sorry we can’t promise you 100% gluten-free lentils.
I guess I've been lucky all these years that I've never been a bean fan. I didn't even realize that was a plus.
Tex
It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
We took a trip to Wisconsin today and saw many fields of soy with corn stalks jutting up. I couldn't see what might have been growing in the corn fields. It seems that it would be impossible to keep the grains separate, but perhaps the machinery spits out the larger corn cobs. Cross-contamination seems inevitable.
Gloria
You never know what you can do until you have to do it.
Because most corn varieties are now "roundup-ready" these days, there is no simple and cost-effective way to completely control volunteer corn plants (from the previous year's crop) in soy beans. That's why those corn plants are out there. And with "roundup-ready" soybeans, the same problem (with volunteer soybean plants) exists in corn. When the soybeans are harvested, the harvesting machines (called combines) will shell the corn as they shell the soybeans, and most of the seeds will go into the grain hopper along with the soybeans. It will carry out the cobs along with the other trash, but most of the grain will be retained.
Some of the corn can be separated out if the combine operator very carefully sets the sieves and air flow in the machine, but many grains of corn are too close to the same size as soybean seed to be separated, so they will end up along with the soybean seed. A similar problem exists when volunteer soybeans are harvested in corn fields, and it's even more difficult to separate soybeans from corn. Because this problem is so widespread, the USDA long ago established strict standards on the percentage of soybeans allowed in corn seed, and vice versa. But the limits are worthless as far as food intolerances are concerned, because they are in percentages (not in parts per million) — up to 2 % for number 1 food grade purposes, and up to 7 % for number 5 feed grade purposes.
The bushel weight of soybeans and corn is the same, so that means that they cannot even be completely separated by the gravity tables used along with other cleaning equipment when cleaning food-grade grains.
Tex
It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
