From Guvar beans to guar gum

The strange ties that linked Rajasthan farmers and Haliburton...

I was never a big fan of kothorangai (Guvar bean), until I learnt more about its awesomeness when researching for an article for Hindustan Times. Especially the frozen variety is such a pain to cook. Sometimes, it is dry, gets freezer burns and tastes like raw fiber. But cook it right and you can get healthy and tasty dishes from it. My favorite dish using this bean is listed at end of the post.

Guvar beans have been cultivated in India for thousands of years as a vegetable and fodder for livestock. It grows well in dry and arid lands with Rajasthan being a leading producer. Because of the environment it is grown in, the bean inside developed means to grab any water it has access to and hold it tightly. It does this using highly branched molecules composed of sugars galactose and mannose.

The fact that a gum can be extracted from the guvar bean became known in 1945, when there was a shortage of locust bean gum during World war 2. General Mills, one of the largest cereal manufacturing companies, saw its potential as a thickener. They worked on extracting the gum out of the bean. The gum comes from the ground endosperm. The remaining by-product - the guar meal, is used as animal fodder.

Flip any frozen meal packet, ice creams and there is a good chance you will find “guar gum” listed as an ingredient, its name inspired by the Indian term - guvar. Guar gum is a hydrocolloid, which means it forms a gel when dispersed in water. It dissolves both in cold and hot water. It inhibits ice crystal growth in ice creams; thicken soups and gravies, and improve flow rate in salad dressings and sauces.

If something is this good, then obviously people try to push it to its maximum limit. In 1992, FDA banned the use of guar gum in “diet pills” because it was found to cause esophageal and small bowel obstruction in some patients who were not aware of its 10-20x water swelling capacity. So no diet pills…but it was fine when used with a bit of common sense. So, they did not ban it from its food industry uses.

However, all these strange connections pales in comparison to the demand guar gum hit around 2010-2012, for it’s use in hydraulic fracking (of all things!). Guar gum along with water, sand and some chemicals are pumped into the wells that not only help drill into the reservoir rocks, but also keep it propped open as they extract natural gas out of the earth. As a bonus, it is non-toxic, and for once, this industry did not have to worry about ensuring its complete capture and disposal. Now, guar gum has been used as a mud loss agent in drilling fluids for a long time before that, but around 2010, the demand became insatiable.

Each hydrofracking well used 10 tons of guar gum. With tens of thousands of wells being operated in the United States, at that time, the surging demand for this gum skyrocketed its prices so much that in 2012 Halliburton Corporation warned shareholders that guar prices accounted for a third of its fracking costs. In Thor Hanson’s book, The Truimph of Seeds, he talked about guar bean farmers getting rich overnight and buying bikes and luxury items in celebration. But the surge in price was unsustainable. Soon, companies started looking for alternatives. And just like guar gum became an alternative to locust bean gum in the 1940’s,  Xanthan gum started to replace guar gum post 2012.

However, research money continues to be poured into guar gum by the food industry who are now working on chemically and enzymatically modified guar gum for even more food applications. All this drama happening with the homely guar beans…, but for now, all I want to know is this - what is your favorite way to cook guar beans? Mine is kothavaranga paruppu usili! Post yours below…