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Garbanzo beans or chickpeas?
Grant Barrett
San Diego, California
1532 Posts
(Offline)
1
2010/03/04 - 10:56am

Will you help with this? It's a quick survey. Which term do you use: garbanzo bean or chickpea? The survey is here.

PS: This is a follow-up to a call we'll be airing on the program, discussed by the listener here.

EmmettRedd
859 Posts
(Offline)
2
2010/03/04 - 11:54am

Grant,

I can now call them both. But, I did not know garbanzo beans until I left home at 18. At home, chickpeas fed my father's family one winter during the Depression when it was the only crop which produced that dry summer in southwest Missouri.

I suppose for purposes of your survey that I should probably answer chickpeas.

Emmett

Guest
3
2010/03/04 - 1:14pm

In the East we called them chickpeas; in the West, especially the Hispanic southwest, we call them garbanzos.

Felipe Ortego

Guest
4
2010/03/04 - 2:41pm

The survey asks for (presumably) what I call them currently, and my current location. I grew up in New York, and always heard them referred to as "chick-peas" until I started going outside the NYC area. Then I started hearing "garbonzos." Now that I'm in Texas, I only hear them called "garbonzos."

Ron Draney
721 Posts
(Offline)
5
2010/03/04 - 2:55pm

They're garbanzo beans to me because that's what it says on the can (with "ceci beans" beneath it in smaller letters). I think you're going to find that the people who call them chickpeas are the ones who cook them from fresh.

(I wonder if peachicks eat chickpeas.)

Grant Barrett
San Diego, California
1532 Posts
(Offline)
6
2010/03/06 - 10:49am

The results are in! With 256 respondents reporting from around the world, here is a map of the results. It looks like Felipe's information is still correct: "garbanzo beans" is the more common term in the Southwest.

Caveats:

--I regularized some of the answers where people felt compelled to include other words along with their main answer.

--A few of the answers are not showing because of a problem with mapping the address given, though I was able to regularize most which had this problem from the start.

–The sample size is too small. You can improve it by spreading the survey. The map will self-update as new answers are added.

–There are no controls for random answers.

–The location information only indicates where people currently are, not where they're from. This is less of a problem than it might appear, because when people move–even all the way across the country–they tend to move to a new location already populated by people like themselves.

Guest
7
2010/07/01 - 3:11am

Chick Peas also known as Chana, Cicer Arietinum, Kabuli chana, kabuli chickpeas, Kabuli Chick Peas, chickpeas, Chana, Kikkererwten, Csicseriborsó, Indian pea, Ceci Bean, Bengal Gram, Konda Kadalai, Kadale Kaalu, Sanaga Pappu, Shimbra and Kadala is mainly cultivated in middle east Asia.

Names in various languages:
Kichererbsen in German,
Ceci in Italian,
Garbanzo, Garbanzo Bean, Garbanzo Beans in Spanish,
Nohut in Turkish,
Aunazirņi in Latvian,
năut in Romanian.
Pois chiches, Chiches in French.

Guest
8
2010/07/13 - 1:47pm

Felipe Ortego said:

In the East we called them chickpeas; in the West, especially the Hispanic southwest, we call them garbanzos.
Felipe Ortego


That's what I grew up calling them in Arizona, too. Not garbanzo beans, just "garbanzos." This might be a result of Spanish influence on regional English. Where I live now in Oregon, most people call hot peppers "chile peppers." In Arizona, most people just call them "chiles."

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