Why are Red Beans and White Beans So Popular in South LA

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With neither of them grown locally, how did they become such a big part of the South LA diet?

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pretty simple wiki will tell all

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Well I'm no historian but if I had to guess, I'd say because they are simple, frugal, and delicious. A big pot is affordable and can easily feed the family.

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No one knows for sure why and how New Orleanians began to eat red beans and rice. “Red beans are to New Orleans what the white bean is to Boston and the cowpea is to South Carolina,” reporters for the Federal Writers Project wrote in 1938. No definite answers exist in the historical record, though it probably travelled over with early nineteenth-century exiles from the French Caribbean.

The dish appears in cookbooks around the turn of the century, with The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, one of the first locally published recipe books, being one of the first to include instructions on how to cook a pot of kidney beans.

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The conventional story goes something like this.

Monday was generally "wash day" for many families back in the old days and that was an all day chore before the advent of washing machines.

Women would put on a pot of beans to cook because they generally were less hands on once you got all the stuff in the pot and it started cooking. They only needing an occasional stir to keep from sticking to the bottom of the pot and that allowed the ladies of the house to do their chores relatively undisturbed.

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