About culinary path dependency: how bad cooking instruction happens to good people, and why it matters. Main case study: beans! We have been sold a false bill of goods when it comes to beans. Bad cooking advice, passed down through the ages, has created ruts of bad bean cooking. That's the only reason Americans don't all LIVE ON BEANS. This episode corrects the bad bean path. It also gives examples of other similarly criminal misdirections--oil in pasta, searing meat and not-washing mushrooms.