Fava bean tops as a leafy green

If you happen to live in a region when nothing much grows, like the very dry parts of southern Europe, you have to be creative. If not you might end up hungry.

Fava beans (Vicia faba) are widely cultivated for their immature inflorescences, fruits and seeds. Howevers, in some areas of Puglia (Southern Italy), other parts of these species are traditionally used as vegetables, instead of being considered as by-products. The culinary use of these products in Puglia, like several wild edible plants, has ancient origins and is the result of food scarcity and poverty of the ancestors in the past[1].

About 5 to 10 centimeters of the top of the fava bean plant is harvested as leafy greens. The Italian term for this vegetable is cime di fava ('fava tops'). Fava greens can be eaten raw, for example in salads (insalata di cime di fava) or cooked like spinach to be used in pasta dishes (pasta con cime di fava) or into quiches and omelets

As the fava greens have a relatively low content of nitrate, they could be recommended as a substitute of nitrate-rich leafy vegetables.

Researchers now consider fava greens to have a good potential as novel foods[2].

[1] Bianco, Santamaria P., Elia A: Nutritional value and nitrate content in edible wild species used in southern Italy in Acta Hortic – 1998
[2] Renna et al: Faba Greens, Globe Artichoke’s Offshoots, Crenate Broomrape and Summer Squash Greens: Unconventional Vegetables of Puglia (Southern Italy) With Good Quality Traits in Frontiers of Plant Science – 2018. See here.