Bobby Bland, age 7, of St. Paul, Minnesota, for his question:

How did the navy bean yet its name?

When you plan a long camping trip, you pack a sack of food. Naturally you don't take fresh eggs because they are too fragile. And cans of soda pop are too bulky to carry very far. You choose nourishing foods that don't take up much room and don't go bad in a few days. Sailors also have to take food supplies when they go to sea. In the olden days, they had to choose nourishing foods that didn't go bad before they reached land again.

Some of the best seagoing foods are dried beans. In New England, people made pots of delicious baked beans from kidney beans that grew very well in their fields and gardens. The sailors took sacks of dried red and white kidney beans to sea. Maybe they liked the white ones better, maybe they were easier to store. In any case, in Boston Harbor the ships of the United States Navy took sacks of them aboard. This is how those splendid white beans come to be called navy beans.